We
have all learned at one time or another that sometimes it is important to
postpone gratification if we want to achieve the greatest rewards in life. But sometimes it goes further than that. Sometimes not postponing gratification can
lead to negative unintended consequences.
If a child eats his desert before his main meal, he loses his appetite
for the truly nutritious part of the meal.
If Congress cuts taxes without cutting expenditures, the national debt
can rise dramatically. If a couple
decides to make love before they can have access to protection, an unwanted
pregnancy or the transmission of disease can result.
What
we are talking about here is thinking in the short term vs. thinking in the
long term. In many areas of life today,
people are focused on short term desires rather than long term desires. One can simply write this off as hedonism,
but hedonism is a descriptive moral term rather than an explanatory term. If we are concerned about the effects of
these attitudes, then we have to try and understand the causes behind them.
I
think that there are two approaches that we can take to this situation. First of all, there is the idea that as life
becomes more and more frictionless, as a result of more and more labor-saving
devices in the external world and as a result of living more and more in screen
reality, both of which create a vacuum-filled alternate field of experience,
that we simply become used to a life that gets easier and more
frictionless. And this totally distorts
the way we sense things in our lives. So
short-term cravings fill our minds, fill the numbness in which we increasingly
live, in order to reconnect to the external world, even if only for brief
moments. People in the American Congress
can pass a tax bill that doles out a lot of benefits in the form of tax relief
particularly to wealthy people. This is thinking in the short term. In the long term, the deficit explodes. But obviously the people who passed this bill
weren’t thinking in the long term. In
order to get some temporary financial grounding in the present, the people in
the American Congress have created a big tension-pocket for their children’s
generation. Some incredibly abrasive
friction in the form of an enormous addition to the national debt. On the surface, on the one hand, that will
certainly pull the children’s generation out of experiential numbness. But the experience of dealing with paying off
even a part of the debt could be so painful, as in the government having to cut
many benefits particularly for the middle class and the poor, that the debt
could drive the average citizen into the internal numbness of a deep
depression.
Another
angle is to start more from the flavor of the experience within the person
rather than on the interactions between the person and modern technology. As a person today sinks into numbness, he
becomes increasingly a free-floating figure in a vacuum. In order to pull himself out of his numbness,
he intermittently takes jabs at solutions within the situation where he finds
himself, in order to generate enough friction during isolated moments and in
order to relieve himself from his numbness and in order to feel more fully
alive during these moments.
When
one is numb, one is in great psychological discomfort. The discomfort is in itself a defense,
although not a healthy one, to help one feel more alive within the numbness. A
terrible tension pocket of abrasive overstimulation to help a person fight the
numbing understimulation of a vacuum.
The only defense against the discomfort is to push the causes of the
pain into the external world.
So we
can say that thinking in terms of the short term is a way to simultaneously
ground oneself intermittently by landing on short term solutions to different
abrasive irritations, both real and imagined, as well as a way to create
stimulation through the process of generating organic friction in order to get
rid of perceived abrasive friction. The only
problem is that short-term solutions to abrasive friction, are, in the long
run, just temporary solutions to secondary problems. The real problem is the experiential numbness
that underlies a lot of human life in the modern world. Yes, tension-pockets of overstimulation – the
waste products and unintended consequences of the technology we use to make
life easier and more frictionless – are not forms of abrasive friction we
purposely search out. But other forms of
abrasive friction are forms of stimulation that we do search out to pull us out
of the fundamental numbness that is the experiential foundation of modern
technological society. Most obviously
motorcycles, hot rods, motorboats, and modern electric guitars among other
sources. But also there are those
situations that we call self-destructive where we do things to defeat our
ostensive goals and then have to live with the ongoing abrasive emotional
stimulation of disappointment as well as the uncomfortable external world
situations that result. Big chronic
problems can result, which, on one level we welcome to fight the numbness from
a perfectly frictionless life. On
another level, these chronic problems not only offer a defense against
numbness, but they offer opportunities to find short-term solutions through
generating organic friction to temporarily eliminate the effects of abrasive
friction.
It is
sad that people need to find ways to self-destruct in order to dedicate
themselves to find solutions to the problems they have created for themselves
and then, using the combination of self-created problems and self-created
solutions to pull themselves out of their numbness and feel alive. Maybe what this tells us is that a certain
amount of healthy organic friction from grounded more traditional more natural
environments is necessary in order to live psychologically more healthy
lives. The search for a perfectly
frictionless life is one that can only lead to continuing major problems for
people.
(c) 2018 Laurence Mesirow
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