Being changed by unknown encounters, not stability, signals a self is alive

Evidence

And if we’re able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are each a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me. For a person invested in a stable and bounded ego, this kind of acknowledgment would be a death wish. But personally, having given up on the idea of an atomic self, I find it to be the surest indicator that I’m alive. … By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic “honing in” would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 471

Categorization

• XREF: The atomic-self denial connects to the reader’s frame of attention-as-world-constitution and the book’s anti-individualist stance. — connects to: An oasis sustains life only through constant exchange and movement — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 240