This isn’t a Luddite manifesto. I like the toys. I like knowing things instantly, finding obscure songs, texting a friend a dumb joke at 2 AM. But I also miss the old heaviness — the non-portable kind. The weight of a book in a bag. The weight of waiting. The weight of a conversation that doesn’t get interrupted by a buzz.
I’ve been thinking about attention lately. Not as a virtue, but as a scarce currency we keep spending on nothing. A five-minute wait for a train becomes a frantic scroll through someone’s vacation photos. A quiet evening becomes a debate with a stranger in a comment section that neither of us will remember tomorrow.
The Weight of the Portable Bull
We could put it down. Leave the phone in another room. Close the laptop at 8 PM. Walk without a route. But the bull has become part of the posture — a slight forward lean, thumbs ready, eyes half-focused on the middle distance where the next little dopamine hit lives.
And yet, we move. That’s the strange part. The bull — the big, heavy, stubborn thing — is supposed to stay in the field. But ours is portable. We drag it to coffee shops, into bed at midnight, onto hiking trails where the only sound should be wind and bad breathing.
This isn’t a Luddite manifesto. I like the toys. I like knowing things instantly, finding obscure songs, texting a friend a dumb joke at 2 AM. But I also miss the old heaviness — the non-portable kind. The weight of a book in a bag. The weight of waiting. The weight of a conversation that doesn’t get interrupted by a buzz.
I’ve been thinking about attention lately. Not as a virtue, but as a scarce currency we keep spending on nothing. A five-minute wait for a train becomes a frantic scroll through someone’s vacation photos. A quiet evening becomes a debate with a stranger in a comment section that neither of us will remember tomorrow. portablebull.blogspot.com
The Weight of the Portable Bull
We could put it down. Leave the phone in another room. Close the laptop at 8 PM. Walk without a route. But the bull has become part of the posture — a slight forward lean, thumbs ready, eyes half-focused on the middle distance where the next little dopamine hit lives. This isn’t a Luddite manifesto
And yet, we move. That’s the strange part. The bull — the big, heavy, stubborn thing — is supposed to stay in the field. But ours is portable. We drag it to coffee shops, into bed at midnight, onto hiking trails where the only sound should be wind and bad breathing. But I also miss the old heaviness — the non-portable kind