Awareness in an Age of Distraction
One of the most pernicious effects of the modern world is now-ubiquitous belief that the user-unfriendliness — the “dullness” — of the real world can be cured or countenanced by user-friendly distractions. Entertainment and various other pre-packaged dreams promise relief — which it can never, by definition, deliver — from this dullness, which make us retreat further into our heads, where the “yammering mind-monkey of [our] own personality’s dark, self-destructive side” waits to take center stage (The Pale King, 316). Easy distractions encourage this flight from the world, to the world of our consciousnesses, what Dosteyvsky’s Underground Man called a “thorough sickness.” “Self-consciousness,” David Foster Wallace explains in Infinite Jest, is “the chattering head, the cackling voices, the chocking-issue, fear versus whatever isn’t fear, self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor” (IJ 118). The main character in Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza, spends his time “scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he’d rather be” (IJ 806). How often is this — the promise of escape, whether in the easy consumption of TV or an all-inclusive trip to Santorini — offered as a panacea for our depression and anxiety? But maybe, just maybe, the dullness is the point of it all, and the user-unfriendliness the cosmic dice rolls that allow us to pretend we’re not god.
I’m reminded of what Nietzsche said about revelation in Ecce Homo, and its possible applications to escaping our age of distraction, and the futility of hoping your own swimming will get you out of the rip current. “The concept of revelation — in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down — that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form — I never had a choice.” Seeking, worrying, the anxiety of missing some huge unspeakable thing, blinds us to the real revelations.
This seems to be the crux of every great philosophy, though put in various ways throughout the years. Socrates, in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, tells his interlocutor Antiphon, “You seem… to imagine that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance. But my belief is that to have no wants is divine; to have as few as possible comes next to the divine; and as that which is divine is supreme, so that which approaches nearest to its nature is nearest to the supreme.”
Right down to Thoreau, living deliberately. In his chapter on Reading he notes, “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers.” Observation, by necessity, is outward focused; it’s a turn of focus away from the mind-monkey’s chatter to the real, which is often “dull” and almost exclusively user-unfriendly. Or his other more-well-known quote, found in the first chapter on Economy, “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
Look hard enough and this is the foundation of any metaphysics. The fact that maybe, just maybe, simple awareness and attention, the silence between the heartbeats, a return to the body and the real, are the only cures to the the disease, ever-ready for the complete devouring of sanity, of self-consciousness.
A skink shows his head on his own time. Skip to the end if you want, but that’s sort of like skipping through a symphony to hear the crescendo. (Obviously my cinematography has some room for improvement, but the point is still made.)