In
today’s world, people increasingly define themselves and are defined by others
with regard to what they do rather than who they are. The more that daily life becomes easier,
becomes more frictionless, the more people feel a need to generate abrasive friction
through their daily activities, in order to pull themselves out of their
numbness. In truth, many if not most
workers today are on call 24/7. The fact
that people can be shocked or jolted out of their recreation or rest by a text
or an email, requiring them to perform
some task for work, is to be expected in today’s world and, on some
level, almost welcomed, because it pulls people out of the numbing routine
involved in their work. So, on one
level, keeping busy with work can be considered an anti-numbness strategy,
because the person has to stay somewhat conscious and focused in order to carry
out his work activities. On the other
hand, doing frictionless mediated routine work on a computer or a smartphone has
a highly numbing aspect to it.
So the
paradox today is that as life gets more and more frictionless, and, in general,
easier, people feel a need to work harder and harder in order to pull
themselves out of the numbness that their frictionless way of life creates for
them. In order to pull themselves
together and prevent the entropy and the resulting entropic disintegration that
is a part of any vacuum, people keep moving.
In a physical vacuum, entropy means the random distribution of atoms
that occurs to matter in such a situation.
In an experiential vacuum, the random distribution and disintegration within
a person’s mind and sense of self is more subtle, but nevertheless, very
present. And numbness is the obvious
external symptom.
Anyway,
one can relax in an organic natural environment filled with organic stimuli, an
environment that provides real grounding such that relaxing doesn’t lead to
disintegration. Of course, in an organic
natural living environment, one does not have the framework of modern
technology to make daily work activities so frictionless. So life requires more effort and exertion to
survive both physically and economically.
But it is precisely this effort and exertion that allows one to actively
engage with his living environment, that is used to make and preserve organic
imprints on this more natural living environment in order to help create a
meaningful life narrative and prepare for death with a surrogate
immortality. So a certain amount of
friction is good and necessary.
Which
is why people are conflicted today. On
the one hand, they embrace all the new devices that make life more and more
frictionless, and they embrace the ease that is created by them. Furthermore, they like what they feel is the
sense of control that they have by pushing the buttons or keys or by giving the
voice commands that set all these processes in motion, processes that replace
what used to be all the efforts and exertions that humans used to have to
expend. It really is almost a sense of
magical control, because all one sees are one’s rational efforts which set
going a whole bunch of technological processes with which, in truth, one has no
direct participation. On the one hand,
one deludes oneself into thinking one is doing something really significant,
making a meaningful imprint by pressing buttons and keys and giving out voice
commands. But these actions are so
shallow and require so little effort.
They don’t engage a person, and they do nothing to pull him out of an
experiential vacuum.
The
same, of course, is true with modern work patterns. A person spends hours working on a computer
or sending and receiving texts and emails on his smartphone, keeping busy. But at the end of the day, he remains stuck
as it were in his numbness. Keeping busy
is not the same as being truly engaged, and feeling truly alive.
But
people today continue to seek out more and more labor-saving technology,
thinking that it will give them a life of ease.
They keep searching for more and more ease through technology, and then to
defend themselves against the numbness, they search for more and more ways to
keep busy through technology. They can’t
tolerate this technology-based ease that ultimately results in more and more
uncomfortable numbness. People become
addicted to labor-saving technology, while at the same time, they have to fight
back against its numbing effects. There
is a conflict, a tension between what is needed in the short term, in order to
satisfy the addiction, and what is needed in the long term: the organic stimuli
from more natural, more traditional living environments after a person is
reconfigured to be able to absorb organic stimuli again. The conflict or tension creates tremendous
stress for an individual. A stress that
affects both mental and physical health.
An
addiction is an attempt to satisfy oneself with an abrasive tension-pocket
experience or experiences that has been internalized in order to fight numbness. And because the internalized vacuum can never
be truly filled with abrasive tension-pocket experience, the addictive behavior
just goes on and on and on. Today people
are becoming increasingly addicted to busy behavior. They go from task to task, from email to
email in an attempt to fill the experiential voids in which they live. Perhaps, the exception to this rule is those
people who are fortunate enough to be able to retire comfortably. In the U.S., many of these people go to live
in retirement communities in Florida, California and Arizona. They move to places that have warm organic
natural fields of experience in which to live, at least, with regards to the
basic living environment. But one of the
things that make these living environments so appealing is that they have an
overlay of modern technology to make life so frictionless. It is like living in paradise, only without
the need for the primary experience work needed to maintain it. However, many of these people end up living
in an experiential vacuum in “paradise” without even the busy work needed to
defend themselves against entropic disintegration. So many of these retirees end up dying after
a few years. The retirees have
difficulty tolerating their retirement in a modern technological world.
One
important point has to be emphasized again. Years of labor-saving technology
during their pre-retirement years has left many of these retirees incapable of
properly absorbing organic stimuli even without the distractions of
labor-saving technology. They go south
to embrace the organic stimulation there, but by that time, they are too numb
to do it. By the time they are
economically ready to retire, they are psychologically incapable of absorbing
it.
Compulsive
busy-ness is simply a symptom of a much deeper problem that affects all of us
to a greater or lesser extent. As long
as we continue to live in the experiential vacuum created by modern
technological society, this busy-ness will continue to serve as a defense
against falling apart.
(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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