ABSTRACT
The chapter starts with an extended discussion on the phenomenology of ‘empty time’, a spatio-temporal and existential condition that can typically be encountered in in-between spaces or non-places of waiting and transit. The problem of how to be content in an empty room (discussed in Chapter 1) is no less a problem of how to be content in empty time. Where this inevitably takes us to is the problem of boredom. The colonisation of empty time by digital capitalism, and with it the capacity for reverie, daydreaming, or mindful distraction inhibits the means by which incipient boredom may potentially sow the seeds of what Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche refers to as ‘cool boredom’: a mindful negation of, and detachment from, modernity's consumerist spectacle. When these arguments spill over into critical analysis of the ‘posthuman mindfulness industry’, which they do in the chapter's final section, the contradictory logic of digital capitalism is laid bare. To the extent that wherever we go, there we are wired, the commodified provision of a mindfulness app becomes an indispensible tool for those seeking a temporary refuge, or time out, from the endless feed of digital information. The idea of mediated or digitally enabled meditation brings with it the idea of a posthuman mindfulness experience in which the ‘consumer’ of that experience is quite literally ‘buying time’. Mindful detachment from the clamour of the digital world becomes possible only insofar as one remains umbilically attached to the very same digital infrastructure that precipitated the need for time out in the first place.
