This life gives you nothing

This life gives you nothing Your attention is all you have. Wasting it is annihilating. Blackbird Spyplane saves literacy in a monumental Year-End Essay. Blackbird Spyplane exists thanks to our readers. Blackbird Spyplane for the World’s Public Libraries We don’t run any ads, we don’t use affiliate links on new clothes, we don’t do any spon. You’re the only people we owe anything, so we keep some of our best material for Classified Tier Subscribers. Upgrade today if you haven’t yet, support greatness and enjoy a better life in the inner sanctum - Jonah & Erin Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Sarah Squirm, Cameron Winter and Geese, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, Patrick Radden Keefe, MJ Lenderman, Evan Kinori, Maya Hawke, Bon Iver, André 3000, Sandy Liang, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Kate Berlant, Clairo, Steven Yeun, Conner O’Malley & more are here . Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe . Our brand-new G.I.F.T.S. List is here . 2025 was The Jacket’s Year - the 21 best are here . 1 - All is full of Screen A disconcerting question strikes me alarmingly often these days. I’ll be out in the world, and I’ll see something ... let’s call it picturesque . Say I’m walking along a nature trail as a white wall of fog avalanches over a ridge, down a canyon of pine and oak, toward the blue waters of the Bay. I will find myself thinking, “My god, that is beautiful.” And then - even if I manage to keep my phone in my pocket, resisting what’s become a powerful instinct to reach for it - I will feel a strange tremor of uncertainty: “Am I looking at a screen right now?” I wonder. In the moment, this uncertainty is not fully articulated, nor, thankfully, does it emerge from some extreme delusional state where I’ve lost my hold on reality. It’s more of a pre-cognitive kind of category confusion. And at the core of the confusion is this: As my life has come to consist so overwhelmingly, and for so many years, of looking at images on screens - and of looking at the world through a camera, which is also a phone, which is also a screen - the distinction for me between the screen and the non-screen can wobble. I still know the difference intellectually. But I don’t always necessarily feel it. That is the disconcerting part. I stare at the hillside, try to pick out individual details and weave them into a living, breathing totality that also includes the cool air on my skin and the birdsong in my ears. As I do this, I tell myself, “This is a real place, this is not an image of a place,” and I repeat that a few times, trying to will back the border dividing the two. Here’s how I make sense of this wobble between...

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