Recreation refers to those activities that we do for enjoyment and that don’t relate to making a living. Ideally, recreation helps us to relax or helps us to express strong passionate enthusiastic feelings. Either way, recreation should be pleasurable, something that brings us contentment and/or joy.
But
in modern technological society the shape of recreating has evolved and
changed. As people increasingly sink
into an experiential vacuum and the numbness it brings with it, there is an
increasingly desperate need that appears to accelerate the will to do things in
order to feel alive. In the past, I have
called this conative acceleration, and it basically means that recreation, in
order to help people overcome numbness in today’s world, has to become more
focused and goal-oriented like work.
Like traditional recreation, it involves activities that a person enjoys
doing that a person is interested in.
But to the extent that these activities become intertwined with the
notion of survival, there develops almost a desperate quality to them.
So
recreation gradually loses its flowing blendable continual elements and starts
to develop the defined discrete focused qualities of work. The more that it loses its flowing organic
qualities, the more that it seems like activities that are done apart from the
person. They become activities that do
not flow as an extension of a person’s core sense of self. Granted there are people who really enjoy
their work activity, but even they must adhere to certain formal defined
discrete criteria, in order to do it right.
And these criteria create the kind of stress, the kind of tension that
are more typical of work activities.
And
as recreation blurs into work activities, the threat of sinking into conative
anesthesia (the numbing of the will) causes people to react by pushing work –
in particular, human work - into robotic-flavored work activities. This way, people can generate abrasive
friction in order to pull out of their technology-based numbness and thus feel
more alive. With robot-like work, everything
has to be neat and crisp and done just so.
Everything has to be done to the perfection of work from a robotic
machine. Meanwhile controllable angular
movements and thought are the substance of these more robotic work
activities. Stress and tension permeate
the robot-flavored work that modern technological humans do and help to keep
people out of numbness.
The
expectation for robotic perfection is something that is not only felt within
the worker, but by employers, partners, clients and customers as well. One mistake can lead to a worker being
treated like a machine. Like a machine
that is going through planned obsolescence and has to be fired or demoted. In a
vacuum, a person is on his own. A
machine, a robot does not receive meaningful community support. If a robot makes a big mistake, and if it
can’t be fixed, the robot can get discarded.
If a human worker makes a big mistake and can’t correct himself, he gets
tossed as well.
There
is one other kind of activity response to the experiential vacuum in which modern
technological society is embedded. And that is purposely numbing the will in
such a way that one doesn’t feel such a strong need to break out of the
enveloping numbness in the external world.
This response of numbness to numbness is manifest in meditation and
yoga, both of which in different ways get a person into a selfless unconscious
state. A strong sense of self is that
which wants to break out of numbness, so if a person can use numbing activities
to calm the self down, the pressure to break out of the enveloping numbness is
alleviated. Meditation and yoga require
effort, but if a person wants to take a short cut to controlled numbness, he
can always resort to pot. Marijuana
smooths off the edges of everything including oneself. Then again, a person can
use hallucinogenic drugs like LSD or peyote or psilocybin or ayahuasca, all of
which create alternative vacuumized organic worlds in a person’s mind. As in a dream, one’s alternative activities
are lived out in the mind. They are definitely
not solid work activities, and one can say they are a cross between
recreational activities and spiritual activities. Recreation and spirituality blur together
here. And in the process, it is as if
one is becoming a massless avatar of oneself.
So
basically in response to the enveloping numbness of the experiential vacuum in
modern technological society, people move in two directions. One direction has them taking the posture of
conative acceleration and blurring into becoming like a robot. The other direction has them taking on the
posture of conative anesthesia and blurring into becoming like an avatar. In both cases, they move away from an organic
coherent sense of self that is crucial to maintaining their humanity. And they move away from their capacity to
make, receive and preserve meaningful organic imprints. And from their capacity to live vibrant joyous
lives. And from their capacity to have a
meaningful life narrative. And from
their capacity to prepare for death with a personal surrogate immortality.
We
started this article with a discussion about recreation and then moved on to a
discussion of other kinds of life activities.
The distortions created by modern technology are such that if we can’t
recreate properly, we can’t work properly and we can’t simply be properly. In the long run, all of our life activities
are interrelated as they should be. They
are all a part of the flowing blendable continual stream of human life.
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