The lost art of thinking slowly
Distilling Books - Number 33
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The following letter is part of our “Distilling Books” collection, in which we extract the most revealing ideas from literature.
🏷️ Categories: Attention, Decision making and biases.
«If you don’t want someone to feel uncomfortable, don’t give them two perspectives on an issue to worry about; give them only one.» — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.
What is reality?
The question seems silly—until you’re alone with it long enough. We live immersed in our routines so naturally that we rarely stop to think whether what we experience every day is reality. We tend to call it “real” because it feels familiar. We’ve seen it many times; it has become part of how we understand the world. But familiarity is no guarantee of truth. Just because something is familiar to our senses doesn’t mean it is reality. It may be only a mirage, a fantasy, a false idea.
More than 2,000 years ago, this question was already being asked.
Plato confronted it in one of philosophy’s most important reflections: the Allegory of the Cave, included in Book VII of The Republic. There he describes prisoners who have lived since childhood inside a cave, chained in such a way that they cannot turn their heads or look at anything other than the wall in front of them. On that wall they see projected shadows—blurred figures that, for them, constitute the entire world, because they have never known anything else. They do not suspect that an outside exists, nor that what they are seeing is not reality.
Their mistake does not come from stupidity, but from the simple limits of their experience.
They have seen nothing else in their lives and believe that this is all there is.
Think about it for a moment.
All of us, in one way or another, inherit ideas, norms, aspirations, and versions of the world that keep us chained. They feel so personal and obvious that we don’t even stop to question them. For us, that is reality.
Now imagine that one of those men manages to leave the cave.
It would be a painful scene. The outside light would hurt his eyes and cause rejection, because discovering reality can feel like that: like a blow to the face. Gradually, however, that same light would allow him to see what he previously only knew as shadows: real objects, true forms, the origin of what he had mistaken for the world. The revelation would consist in understanding that his entire previous reality was incomplete.
What if he returned to the cave to tell the others?
That was what Socrates wondered.
Most likely, he would feel compassion for the others, because he would know they are still trapped in a narrow reality without even realizing it. If he decided to return and share what he had seen, his testimony would not be received with gratitude. The prisoners would see his account as a threat to the order they know and would react as human beings so often do when something disrupts the stability of their certainties.
Truth often looks like madness in the eyes of those who are not ready to see it.
The digital cave
If Plato were writing this allegory today, the cave might not be a dark space.
Perhaps it would be flooded with screens, brightness, voices, notifications, and endless messages competing for our attention. That is the contemporary problem: mental saturation from information overload. The average person consumes 35 GB of information per day (Bohn & Short, 2012).
We no longer live among shadows of an incomplete reality.
We live among lights so bright they blind us.
Here, Byung-Chul Han’s perspective is intriguing. In works such as The Burnout Society, In the Swarm, and Psychopolitics, he describes how the digital world has saturated our lives to the point of disorientation. The digital world exposes us to an infinite stream of information, algorithmically personalized content, and performance metrics in the form of comments, “likes,” and shares.
Sometimes we think we are choosing, when in reality we are being guided.
The algorithm does not enter your mind, but it does have the power to decide what appears before your eyes again and again, which topics become ubiquitous, which voices are visible, and which are buried under more profitable or addictive content (Gilardi et al., 2022). We also know that platforms like Facebook and other networks have influenced political and electoral behavior (Bond et al., 2012).
No one tells you what to think, but they do decide what you think about.
That is the reality of content with the nice-sounding name “For You” or “Recommended.”
It is not a perfect conspiracy—just a handful of platforms organizing the attention of millions of people, ultimately shaping what feels urgent, visible, and, in a sense, what counts as real to them.
What is not made visible does not exist.
Leaving the digital cave
There is no need to disappear from the world or become a hermit.
Leaving the digital cave means learning to relate to the digital world in a more critical way. The key is becoming a little harder to manipulate.
In this era of speed and instant reaction, we need to slow down and think more carefully.
1. Compare before believing
One of the simplest ways to break a narrative is to see it from multiple angles. When you only consume one version of a story, it is very easy to mistake framing for full reality. That is confirmation bias: we tend to trust information that reinforces what we already believe.
Look deliberately for topics, authors, or media that go against your views.
Notice which data stays consistent and which changes depending on the source.
Ask yourself what information appears in one coverage and disappears in another.
If a topic matters to you, go to the original source: report, public document, statement, or study. Don’t stay on the surface.
2. Give more weight to the slow than the urgent
Fast information usually arrives first, but almost never arrives well.
Today’s headlines are designed to capture attention, rarely to provide clarity. It is impossible to fully understand events that have just happened and whose information has not yet settled. The present is only truly understood once it begins to become the past. Everything else is noise.
Reduce real-time consumption if it does not directly affect your life.
Spend more time on analysis, reports, essays, or research.
Wait a few days before forming an opinion on recent news.
Save important topics to revisit when there is more context.
3. Be suspicious of what hijacks your emotions
If content tries to make you angry, alarmed, or excited before giving you context, it is probably not trying to help you understand. It is trying to capture your attention and monetize it.
Be wary of content that triggers instant reactions of anger, fear, or euphoria.
Before sharing something, ask yourself: is it informing me or agitating me? Take time before commenting or sharing.
4. Consume less, but with more intention
An overloaded informational diet does not necessarily make you more lucid. The mind also needs space to process.
Avoid opening social media or news every time you feel bored, uncomfortable, or empty. Get informed when there is something you are genuinely curious about and want to explore.
Replace fragmented consumption with longer, more sustained reading.
Clean up accounts and channels that only add noise. Less is more.
The key is not to know everything. That is impossible.
The key is not letting others decide what should exist in your mind.
That is why the Allegory of the Cave is still so relevant. Plato imagined prisoners confusing shadows with reality because they had never seen anything else. We live in a world where the problem is no longer lack of information, but the biased, accelerated, and uneven selection of what we see.
Thinking for yourself starts with choosing where you place your attention.
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:
✍️ Your turn: When was the last time you changed your mind after hearing a different perspective?
💭 Quote of the day: «Coming out of darkness into daylight, that soul has been blinded by the excess of light.» — Plato, The Republic
See you next time! 👋
References 📚
Bohn, R. E., y Short, J. E. (2012). Measuring Consumer Information. International Journal Of Communication, 6, 980-1000. URL
Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489(7415), 295-298. URL
Gilardi, F., Gessler, T., Kubli, M., & Müller, S. (2021). Social Media and Political Agenda Setting. Political Communication, 39(1), 39-60. URL
Plato. The Republic.
Nice article Álvaro. It gave me a new perspective on the Republic. What if, in today's inundations of data and oceans of media, the Cave allegory was reversed? Perhaps we need to go into the Cave to find Truth, Beauty and Goodness? We are chained in the blinding light? Actually now that I think more deeply, the Cave allegory is probably better. Those who are chained do have a lot more to look at these days though~! LOL