In a remarkable post-pandemic resurrection, Bangkok has not only emerged as Southeast Asia‘s top destination, but also the region’s leading...

Our world treats information like it’s always good. More data, more content, more inputs — we want it all without thinking twice. To say that the last twenty-five years of culture have centered around info-maximalism wouldn’t be an exaggeration. I hope we’re coming to the end of that phase. More than ever before, it feels like we have to — that we just can’t go on like this. But the solution cannot come from within; it won’t be a better tool or even better information to get us out of this mess. It will be us, feeling and acting differently. Think about this comparison: Information is to wisdom what pornography is to real intimacy. I’m not here to moralize, so I compare to pornography with all the necessary trepidation. Without judgement, it’s my observation that pornography depicts physical connection while creating emotional distance. I think information is like that. There’s a difference between information and wisdom that hinges on volume. More information promises to show us more of reality, but too much of it can easily hide the truth. Information can be pornography — a simulation that, when consumed without limits, can weaken our ability to experience the real thing. When we feel overwhelmed by information — anxious and unable to process what we’ve already taken in — we’re realizing that “more” doesn’t help us find truth. But because we have also established information as a fundamental good in our society, failure to keep up with it, make sense of it, and even profit from it feels like a personal moral failure. There is only one way out of that. We don’t need another filter. We need a different emotional response to information. We should not only question why our accepted spectrum of emotional response to information — in the general sense — is mostly limited to the space between curiosity and desire, but actively develop a capacity for disgust when it becomes too much. And it has become too much. Some people may say that we just need better information skills and tools, not less information. But this misses how fundamentally our minds need space and time to turn information into understanding. When every moment is filled with new inputs, we can’t fully absorb, process, and reflect upon what we’ve consumed. Reflection, not consumptions, creates wisdom. Reflection requires quiet, isolation, and inactivity. Some people say that while technology has expanded over the last twenty-five years, culture hasn’t. If they needed a good defense for that idea, well, I think this is it: A world without idleness is a truly world without creativity. I’m using loaded moral language here for a purpose — to illustrate an imbalance in our information-saturated culture. Idleness is a pejorative these days, though it needn’t be. We don’t refer to compulsive information consumption as gluttony, though we should. And if attention is our most precious resource — as an information-driven economy would imply — why isn’t its commercial exploitation condemned as avarice? As I ask these questions I’m really looking for where individuals like you and me have leverage. If our attention is our currency, then leverage will come with the capacity to not pay it. To not look, to not listen, to not react, to not share. And as has always been true of us human beings, actions are feelings echoed outside the body. We must learn not just to withhold our attention but to feel disgust at ceaseless claims to it.

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The store is conceived as an “exploded box,” symbolizing the act of breaking free. Red brick flooring, lightweight brick walls,...