25 - Pick your poison

The wide blue of a quiet mind is an insult to the gods of popular entertainments. Fill yours at all times with jingles and other sweet and sparkly things.

- Jon H. Kuzplinsky

Human consciousness innately internalises exterior phenomena, be it a particular landscape, a personal interaction, the projected interior state of another or what is expected of us in a situation. And in that process we identify ourselves with the things or the goals they seem to encourage. By these means we kind of tune ourselves into the activity and maximise our ability to function effectively in it. A massively useful capability but one which we may not have any great innate skill at managing successfully in the long or medium term.

The complexity of the human world and the activities most humans engage with on a daily basis mean that no sooner have we finished one thing then we are onto the next one, often without a pause for breath. And the pause, the taking a moment to collect yourself might well be the essential factor in allowing us to reset our interior landscape. This is not a world that favours the righteous pause, or at least one that does so only nominally. Constant distraction and occupation is required to keep us... well, distracted and occupied – so we don’t actually pay attention to where we are. Therefore we may get little enough opportunity to evaluate our attachments and adjust our investment in them effectively. Consequently, the patterns we engage with to make and manage our personal or professional attachments in the first place and our inhibitory skills, might be functioning in a less than optimal manner.

Technology is nominally supposed to speed up and make easier how we complete tasks and manage time. And our technologies have become significantly more powerful over time. But there is always a trade off in these kind of social evolutions. And we tend to become significantly more dependant upon them as they accumulate capacities. There seems to be a counter intuitive principle at work in the world as we know it - The more pervasive and useful our tools become, the less time we seem to have to enjoy them. This is because the more tools we have for managing interior space, the more those self management skills are made redundant in ourselves. So while the machinery acts as a stand in, the operator becomes less and less able to inherently fulfil their function. A function that would once have come more naturally and easily. It doesn’t matter then how great the tool is, if its usage renders the user more and more dependant on the tool to keep chaos at bay. If they have to subsequently suffer the absence of their tools, the internal capacity to compensate is underdeveloped. Furthermore, the more dependant upon the tools we become, the more tools we require to learn how to use and manage in order to maintain that dependence. So instead of having a highly efficient, adaptable, skill set to manage our time and processes in the real world, we develop meta organizational skills that focus upon tool management and co-ordination of reduced data streams that that represent the inputs and outputs to and from our technologies. We depend on the machinery for everything else. The machinery takes the place of internal self organising and so becomes the arena itself in which we act. So not only do we become less skilled at self management, the arena the self is operating within becomes narrower. The more we become absorbed into this electronic dependant world, the more vulnerable we become if the lights ever get turned off.

For example, many modern humans find themselves quivering over their beautifully glowing smart phone like a spider over a fly, oblivious to the world that carries on all around them. The device becomes the viewfinder through which the view is perceived – It simultaneously becomes largely the view itself. The perfect example of this is the punter at the rock concert watching the action through the camera on their phone, while the actual artist is performing right before them. Actual experience of the event that is occurring, insofar as it can be deemed to be actual, is avoided in favour of the reliable and more controllable virtual analogue. And if, by some misfortune, that phone breaks, they might well find themselves hanging around under bridges offering to service truckers for spare change to put a down payment on the newest glowy smart box on the market.

The object is the experience of the device. The driving force for the intense attachment to the device is an engineered ubiquity of reference and inference, all relating to the importance of these devices to modern experience. Once you become attached to the experience of smart technology, then smart technology itself becomes a way of being more intensely involved with the minutiae of smart technology, the things it can do, its limitations, and how the new iterations coming just around the corner will solve this problem you previously were unaware you had.

To be clear, I am no Luddite. I love technology and its little glowing boxes as much as the next person. But my attachment to it, in no way mitigates the ill managed way the human race is currently engaged with this new arena. Of course, this initial fumbling engagement with the sudden appearance of nigh boundless possibilities is all part of a process that may well result in a superior experience of life. The machinery is after all, comparatively fantastic and wonderful. Those who interface with it, just have to figure out better ways of doing so. But this kind of attachment is highly illustrative of a principle of a particularly human form of self chosen bondage. “If you gaze into the abyss then the abyss will gaze back into you”, said Nietzsche. “If you become attached to an object or a way of being then that object or way of being will become attached to you”, said me. I think Nietzsche has me on the style, flavour, quality, profundity, range and depth of meaning. And I have him on the...

The fact is our devices serve as a kind of Pavlovian stimulus delivery system for connectedness, contact, immediacy of access and a kind of convenience that technology seems to serve particularly effectively. A kind of convenience that takes up far more real estate than the initial improvement it brings. I desperately check on my social network of choice to see if anyone validates my existence by validating the impulse I just posted. If they do, then the thrill is akin to having something published. You have confirmation of an audience. You achieve a social connection that is all gain and no pain – since there is no actual connection beyond the modifying of digital information on a hard drive somewhere in Turkmenistan. But it is not without the possibility of pain, since the thrill of connection sets up the desire for more of the same confirmation and the expectation of more. This also makes me vulnerable to neglect or attack that can have significant consequences on my experience of being. Consequences that didn’t exist prior to my engagement in the arena.

The consequence free nature of comment in such a identity fluid environment means people are free to indulge their worst impulses without the natural regulatory influence of physical proximity and the social cues and engagements that brings. The homicidal psychopath refuses to recognise the humanity of their victim owing to their neurological dysfunction. The cyber self has no such hurdle to leap since there is no humanity proximate, no social cues to modify impulse. Cruelty is therefore no more serious to them than the digital death of the figure on the screen during a video game. No death occurs when I machine gun a zombie into myriad bloody chunks in a game. Therefore to my mind, no cruelty occurs when I comment on a teenagers weight issues in her picture posting and suggest she might do some work on her personal hygiene or what have you. The one has made way for the other. Both might occur in the digital arena but are in fact very different phenomena. But the perpetrator cannot feel that difference, therefore it doesn’t exist. We insult, bully and malign strangers on a social media site as easily as blow up a house full of Nazi werewolves in a video game. This is illustrative of a kind of destructive detachment that technology engenders. Both states of detachment and attachment are heightened in the digital arena.

Let’s say, in the actual, physical world, that I find my house has been burgled. Now I could scream and roar down the phone at the operator. Run around like a headless chicken. Rip out whole chunks of my scalp in despair at the loss of my home cinema system. Smack myself in the face with mallets over the awful intrusion of it all. I could do that. That might well be the kind of thing I could do.

Or I might just shrug and move on with my day. Nothing can be gained through further engagement and struggle with an event that has alreadyoccurred and is beyond my control. I might do what is necessary – Report the incident to the police, take note of the losses. Prepare my insurance claim, what have you. But if I refuse to fret about the fact that someone has invaded my private space, because that notion is nothing more than a mental projection I place upon my home, then I am likely so save myself a lot on therapy bills. I would prefer that my sense of security not depend on my illusions about the impenetrability of four walls and a roof. I refuse to think any further about the objects that have been lost, since they are absent phenomena. They should only command my attention when they are before me, requiring my attention. That would be a useful kind of detachment to practice.

It’s important to avoid taking anything too seriously. The important thing in that sentence is the word “too”. The implication of that word being - something in excess. It is the excess which is to be avoided. This naturally begs the question, “What is excessive?” Anything related to the subject or activity that does not serve it. Unnecessary expenditure on things that are self-evidently beyond my control. This is not to say that attachment is a bad thing by any means. Especially as concerns our loved ones or those who are in our care. When I speak of detachment I am explicitly referring to situations where detachment is not an impediment to effective functioning. A detached parent might not be much comfort to a small child. To be fully alive and to experience all that life has to offer requires attachment, love and the full experience and expression of these potentially extremely nourishing things. To shirk meaningful attachment because it serves some other personal agenda or from fear or just the inconvenience of it all, would be an utter travesty. It’s a very good idea to reserve my attachments only to things that merit it, to know what is important and divest myself of the clutter. I thereby keep the greater bulk of my mentality free and loose so I can be more present for what is important, and experience all that it has to offer more completely.

While it’s important to avoid taking anything too seriously, it’s equally important to take things seriously enough. It’s a bit of a fine balancing act. Considerable discrimination is required. And of course, there is always the notion that any difficulties I might experience at times of excessive attachment, and the conflict and emotional struggle and inhibition of clarity I might experience as a result, might well serve as a spur to further personal development. So sometimes being excessively attached can be worthwhile - but that state of affairs cannot be manufactured. There is no useful way I can possibly try and engineer some neurotic fixation in order to produce some kind of enlightenment. However, it’s worthwhile to strive to arrive at a place of useful detachment, where I naturally avoid needless personal expenditure and waste. The kind of “staying awake at night fretting about the report that my asshole boss might request”, kind of wastage. The kind of “dwelling on what the bitch in the cubicle next door said about me six month ago”, waste of energy.

An event in the past is beyond my control. Assimilating it and learning from it might well be within my control and so perhaps a certain amount of skilful dwelling upon it, might be inevitable and useful. Future events are similarly beyond my control. Fruitful engagement with my responsibilities in the present is not. It is attention to these that lend coherence to my life. (We will ignore for these purposes the truth that my present is in fact the immediate past). It is through dealing with difficulties in the right spirit that I become someone I myself can respect because, in this, there can be no hiding. I know my own motivations and my own actions. I can see the cause and the effect and I know why I participated as I did. I have always known when those motivations and actions ran contrary to what I knew to be just. And I have experience shame at those times. I did not enjoy the experience. When I put away childish things and behaved in accordance with what I understood to be natural justice, I felt no such discomfort. But, interestingly enough, when I exceeded them to my own cost and someone else’s unwarranted gain, again contravening natural justice but in service of some warm ego enhancement, I also experienced shame. Due measure and natural justice it seems are favoured companions. To walk a fine line. It is something that cannot be faked. Can I respect myself, not according to some bogus notion of what a man or woman should be, but according to what I deeply know myself to actually be? It is also pretty essential that I do not become someone I pat on the back since this can lead to extreme elbowstrain.