Time and Distraction
(Below is something I cut out of this week's newsletter on the Adam Gazzaley book review. It didn't fit that article, but I still liked it. I reproduce it here as I think it helps understand how social media, and more broadly, simple distraction, should be contextualised and understood and scourged)
There is a type of pain associated with living a self-directed, conscious, meaningful life. This pain stems from the struggle to escape the feeling of adversity one experiences when undertaking a significant, complex and meaningful task.
There is a pain in acknowledging that we can't have it all, and we may fall short. Compared with our imaginations, we usually have access to very little of the totality of fantasies we can conjure up.
This rather cruel observation is commonly levelled at women, who are sold this vicious bill of goods before they're old or wise enough to know any better. Yet the individuals dropping these judgements on young women seem oblivious to how ubiquitous this phenomenon is in all modern humans. Particularly chronically online cultures.
The way we ignore facing the facts of our lives and what is required to live a meaningful life is a simple: distraction. Distraction exerts its control through internal and external interruptions. Both can feed into one another and mutually reinforce personal failure.
A based online account and a “whore” e-girl are, in this way at least, birds of the same feather. They have a preference for indulgence in distraction, spectacle and imagination. Facing the hard facts and discluding fantasy as a means to a better life are not on the menu here.
Dropping distraction requires acknowledgement of limitations. Seeing limitations doesn't feel particularly good, particularly when other duplicitous accounts online sell their fake moral superiority and digitally enhanced lives to you.
Distraction is a powerful way in which we engage in the human past time of avoidance of pain and discomfort. I don't mean physical pain, but pain in a broader sense to encapsulate "unpleasant feelings".
Such as those we experience when undertaking an important task or deciding to do something that may not have guaranteed success.
In focusing on a task, particularly in a crisis of personal motivation, we must acknowledge the possible shortcomings in our vision or project.
We are forced to acknowledge the imperfection of our work in actuality. It is in this way that the distraction we experience when engaging in activities of ease are so destructive. We would rather choose to maintain the unblemished vision of what we feel should be than face the potential of failure when actualising the vision.
Of course, we all know unpleasant feelings or discomfort are a natural feature of bringing something into reality with focus and tangible (non-scrolling) activity.
Action forces acknowledgement of shortcomings. Of the perfection of imagination falling short in reality. We are forced to wrangle with failure and limitation when we act.
Through social media in particular it has become easier than ever before, from this place of avoidance of discomfort, to associate oneself with any number of easy labels of superiority.
People consistently say to not act in real life; doing it from here is easier and more effective. No one in world history worth their salt would ever have considered such an abomination of a view reasonable in any way.
Yet, from the perspective of this analysis, this is simply another species of avoidance through spectacle and distraction.
We see so many clandestine variations of this general theme. In the worst cases (without detectable humour) features such as having lactose tolerance or "the right" hair colour or having professed adherence to a proper moral code in a book from a digital pulpit act as feeble appeals to a superiority of pure, unbridled laziness.
An indulgence in a rather pathetic type of emotive egoistic distraction. A passive spectacle covering up boredom and listless inaction.
Good for nothing other than altogether avoiding the pain of living a meaningful and active life.
You show me the fantasies a man chooses to live with, and I'll show you what his past life experience has really been.
Social media is very sneaky; it has dual purposes. It distracts us from something that could make us better. Superior.
It achieves this through the subversion of making us feel unique or different in some way when we are not.
This is concretised by others furiously indulging in the same dog-chasing-own-tail scenario. These groups enforce these in-group mediocrities in the standard set of common mammalian ways. Despite being superior.
Being in groups or movements can make us feel like something is happening when something definitely isn't happening. All the time, it merely covers up what is not happening for us.
Solutions or victories that never happened anywhere except in the imaginations of those that saw the pixels. All the time, it merely covers up that we have not actualised our imaginations in any measurable way.
Living in these worlds can also make us think that we're held back in a way that, in reality, we're not really held back in. Or it’s not as serious or hopeless as we make it out to be.
We simply can't face up to the fact that we must do something about it. Because that would mean an embrace of discomfort.
We constantly imagine ourselves in all sorts of conundrums that don't exist outside of a flickering, barely perceptible thought that pops up in our empty skulls.
Worse yet, we are actively collaborating in being distracted away from our unease. This isn’t done to us, we are front and centre.
Amplification is encouraged by those who are addicts of boredom and spectacle - for bread and circuses.
In this case, almost always not even bread, just circuses!
The stream of our actual experience is what will flash in front of our eyes at the moment of our death. Not imagination or fantasies. The bare bones of what happened.
In confronting ourselves, our mortality and finitude through living a non-distracted life of hard choices and as little fantasy as possible, lies a paradoxical power. Having to make choices and work on them with focus on real activities through discomfort requires the removal of the burden of imagination.
That burden is the only thing that lies between you and what you're capable of.
You had on average 950 months to get something of worth out to the world. I’d imagine you’re getting close to half that - and that isn’t a guarantee, you may only have a day left for all we know. Put the phone down, suck it up, and get to it.