Solving The Problems Of Life Without Machines

 

            In navigating the pathways in our lives, we all are confronted with lots of problems to solve on a regular basis.  Problems are those situations that have to be corrected in order to make our lives more comfortable, more functional, and more safe.  In more traditional societies many problems were conceived of as something that had to be fixed through direct engagement involving immediate primary experience.  Without the availability of modern machines to overcome the difficulties in problems, people had to grapple sometime with friction-filled situations using the flowing blendable continual stimuli of technique and craftsmanship to create solutions in societies where material tools were basic.

            Of course not all problems lend themselves to solutions with tools or materials.  Medical problems don’t always respond to the medicines or herbs that are available.  Social and political problems are too intangible and complex to always lend themselves to basic solutions.  And then there are questions about death and the universe which lend themselves to complex but inconclusive discussions about vacuumized entities like gods, angels, and a wealth of mythological creatures.  Finally, there are the personal problems of psychological states: anxiety, depression, phobias, compulsions, hallucinations, and others.  In preindustrial societies, people with mental problems were frequently looked at as being controlled by an outside force: everything from the curse of a sorcerer to a witch to a wandering soul to a devil.  What these attempted explanations or solutions have in common is that they aren’t based on the defined discrete stimuli of data and statistics.  They are based on the more blurry flowing blendable continual stimuli of natural medicines and herbs, philosophical ideas, spiritual and mythological entities and sorcerers, witches, wandering souls, and devils.  Even though the spiritual, mythological and magical entities partly belong in a vacuumized spirit world, they are also pretty grounded in natural organic stimuli.

            All this is in stark contrast to the preferred methods of solving problems in modern technological society.  For one thing, the tools used to fix problems in external world reality are so different.  Electric saws, drills and hammers, on one level, make fixing processes easier and quicker.  On the other hand, they create a lot of abrasive stimuli and abrasive friction in the form of bursts of pressure, bursts of noise, and bursts of dust.  In other words, these modern machine tools create vacuum and tension-pocket experiences.  Then, there are all the digitally-based machines that make and fix things through totally mediated processes.  Nowadays, it is frequently easier and cheaper to replace something that is broken than to bother to try and fix it.  And this is because all the digital tools we use to carry out our basic daily tasks have become so complex.

            And then there is the preferred way that we deal with thought problems today.  We no longer seem to trust intuition or philosophical abstraction so much.  We want direct physical sensory evidence for dealing with every problem.  And for solutions, we prefer the approaches of hard science: formal experimentation, logic, data, and statistics.  These are kinds of knowledge that lead to narrow shallow solutions.  And this is because these sources are all based on defined discrete entities: a piece of hard evidence, an axiom of hard logic, a confirmed piece of data, a confirmed statistic.  There are a delimited infinity of these defined discrete entities, which, as has been pointed out in the past in this column, is a smaller infinity than the non-delimited infinity of more flowing blendable continual entities like an intuition or a blurry abstraction.

            Delimited infinities are more controllable because they deal with fewer entities.  But they leave out so many different possibilities.  Not all solutions to problems are based on hard knowledge or hard facts.  Some are based on blurry intuition and blurry abstraction.  Delimited infinities of defined discrete entities are not conducive to developing the expansive global solutions that some kinds of problems may require.  Many of the problems in modern society like mass murders, opioid addictions, addictions to authoritarian cult figures like Trump, propensities to suicidal tendencies just do not lend themselves to easy explanations from defined discrete causality.  The only explanations that are possible and appropriate are based on changes in the blurry configuration of how people experience the world.  But these are not the kinds of explanations that most people are primed to look for in modern technological society.  They want delimited responses.  They want controllable delimited solutions.

            People today want to turn all life situations into controllable events with defined beginnings, defined middles and defined solutions at the end.  In the process of configuring life this way, they lose the vibrancy of life experience, which is normally a part of the solutions in more traditional pre-industrial societies.  In other words, in more traditional societies, part of the solution to a problem lies in the journey to the solution, rather than exclusively in the endpoint or the goal.  Life as a series of completed goals or solutions is a life that is missing something very fundamental: life.  It is one reason that so many people today experience psychological problems like anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies.  Even in their patterns of thought, some traditional people have known that sometimes it is necessary to surrender to a situation rather than try and control it.  Not surrender in the sense of defeat, but surrender in the sense of fully opening oneself up to experiencing something.  And then, rather than simply using analysis, one uses intuition.  Intuition is not as controllable as analysis, but it can lead to solutions that are just as effective in their own way.  And it allows people to feel life, even as they are trying to solve it.

(c) 2020 Laurence Mesirow

Today We’re Overwhelmed By Simply Talking With One Another.

            The whole nature of conversation has been changing over these last years.  For one thing, conversation no longer necessarily involves spoken utterances.  As a matter of fact, for many people, including most young people, spoken utterances no longer seem to be the first resort for many casual conversations.  Chatting now involves written exchanges on social media like Facebook.  People type away like crazy on their smartphones to maintain a rhythm of conversation that would approach their rhythm if they were engaged in an oral conversation.  So the question is why do so many people gravitate to written chatting rather than oral chatting?

            The answer resides in the gradual reconfiguration of the fields of stimulation that people have been experiencing as a result of technological change.  Increasingly, modern technology has been displacing more traditional natural living environments, and, as a result, the amount of organic stimuli that people have been receiving has been diminishing significantly.  People today are surrounded by the mechanical stimuli of many machines and devices and by the digital stimuli that run screen-based machines like computers and televisions, the Internet of Things, 3 D printing, and virtual reality.  In other words, people are surrounded by defined discrete stimuli rather than the flowing blendable continual stimuli, the organic stimuli that are found in nature.  As this transformation in the fields of experience occur, so also does the human capacity to be receptive to different categories of stimuli.  As people surround themselves with modern machines and digital stimuli, they gradually lose their receptivity to organic stimuli.  In terms of communication, people began to feel overwhelmed by face-to-face primary experience conversation and to feel increasingly comfortable in mediated forms of communication.  Before texting came along, there was obviously the less mediated form of communication of the telephone.  The telephone captured one part of the organic imprint that was made in face-to-face conversation: namely, the human voice.  Missing were the facial expressions and the body gestures that are such an important part of face-to-face primary experience communication.  But at least on the phone, one could convey a lot through vocal inflection, volume, tone, and speed.

            However, one other thing is missing on the phone that is present in face-to-face: the knowledge of the sustained presence of the person with whom one is talking, even when the person is silent.  In face-to-face conversations, the companion is presented as more than simply a series of defined discrete chopped-up bits and pieces of conversation.  The companion is endowed with a 3 dimensional external world reality of mass, matter and substance.  When one is talking with a person face-to-face, there is grounding from the common physical space where both people are as well as the presence of a bonding among the people talking.  In phone conversations, where people experience each other as chopped up sensations, common physical grounding is non-existent and bonding is much more tenuous and fragile.  Between the periods of time when a person is talking, there is the vacuum of silence when for all intensive purposes, he ceases to sensorily exist. It is hard to bond or be grounded with someone who only exists as a series of chopped-up auditory images.

            When we move to texting, we move to a more mediated form of communication.  There is no direct organic imprint from the physical presence of the person with whom one is texting.  The communication is done through the thoughts put down in writing of the people involved.  Again, as with the vocal communication on the phone, there is a vacuum of silence between written utterances.  However, the vacuumization is carried further, because there is no sensory presence of the person with whom one is talking.  With a phone call there is the voice, but with texting one only witnesses the physical presence or imprint of the thoughts of one’s companions.  So the whole experience is sensorily vacuumized.  There is no real external world grounding, and real bonding is very tenuous at best.

            Young people today love texting, but everybody, because of Covid 19, has been moving to another manifestation of digital communication, namely what I call screen reality communication: Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp, FaceTime.  On the one hand these screen reality forms of communication allow a person to be visually presented to his companion or companions just like in face-to-face external world communication.  But it is like a trick, because one is visually present without being physically present.  The visual images lack depth, they are flat.  They are vacuumized images.  One cannot touch or smell the other person.  It is as if one is lulled into a false sense of communion.  The image of the other person lacks mass, matter and substance.

            With texting, there are no illusions.  The whole experience is vacuumized.  But with screen reality communication, one can still feel as if one is having a meaningful communing experience.  And screen reality communication is even less vacuumized than straight talking on the phone.  We can say that screen reality communication blurs together with face-to-face communication and the danger is that not only does screen reality communication imitate face-to-face communication, but face-to-face communication starts to feel more mediated like screen reality communication.  A person can become so reconfigured by digital communication that his capacity to commune and bond with other people becomes severely affected.  Nevertheless, I recently wrote an article for this column in which I stated that, because of Covid 19, it was better to use Zoom and other such visual forms of communication to have some visual connection to people, rather than to be totally visually isolated and thus sink into an even deeper level of numbness in a deeper experiential vacuum.  I still believe this, in spite of the side effects, and I look forward to the day when we have a vaccine and, thus, face-to-face primary experience will become safe again.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

  

How Technology Is Becoming More Interesting Than Ideas

                       

            My Saturday morning entrepreneur group has been an ongoing theme in this column.  And this is very simply because so many of the situations that unfold at its meetings are extremely relevant to my main topic: the effects of modern technology on living environments and human behavior.  Last Saturday, there was a long sustained conversation about the different technologies associated with Zoom and other similar apps for conversation.  This kind of discussion is going to become more and more common in the group in the coming weeks.  It used to be that on those days when the group didn’t have a speaker, there would be a discussion of ideas related to business.  For some of these meetings, one could have ventured to say the discussion got quite philosophical. 

            And one might say on a philosophical level, that the group is gradually shifting from conversations of substance to conversations of process.  By conversations of substance, I am referring to discussions of ideas.  A discussion of ideas is an important element to giving a person psychological grounding, so that he can develop rooted attitudes and perspectives, mental ballast that can give him a solid orientation towards his activities.  The discussions of ideas in the entrepreneurial group were meaningful substantive discussions that I think were very helpful in terms of monitoring the general flow of the business activities of the members.

            Nowadays, in the vacuum and tension-pocket world in which we live, a world where there is very little grounding either psychological or physical, the stabilizing agent for people comes in a predictable trajectory of movement, the conversion of raw movement into process.  If one is going to have to live in a vacuum, one at least wants to be able to propel oneself in different directions, so that one doesn’t disintegrate from entropy and so that one doesn’t collide with other free-floating and actively moving figures.

            In general, we can say that the stabilizing agent of grounding from more traditional natural situations and environments leads to stillness, while the stabilizing agent of controlled movement in modern technological situations and environments leads to a predictable trajectory of movement.  In each case the stabilizing agent leads to a certain amount of calm and confidence in humans.

            The Saturday morning entrepreneur group in a certain way was a throwback to a more traditional grouping of people.  Old-fashion businesspeople.  But the combination of Covid 19 along with the introduction of new younger members has led to a shift of focus from substance to process – more typical in general of many people in modern technological society.  Many people in the group feel very comfortable and secure talking about technological strategies because it converts their daily life movements into predictable processes.  Modern technology is not only a vehicle through Zoom and other similar apps for reestablishing superficially a sense of community that has been lost through Covid 19.  More important, it becomes a kind of stabilizing agent in and of itself.

            But just how good of a stabilizing agent is modern technology?  Modern technological devices are built around data which are constantly shifting (unlike beliefs and ideas).  So there is nothing to grab a hold of there.  The only stability comes in continuing to move on a planned pathway.  The key here is that one has to keep moving.  There is no rest for the weary.  And without stillness, there is little opportunity to link up with other people and to bond with them.  I know someone is going to show me the example of a spaceship linking up with the space station, both of which are moving.  But look how many calculations, how much planning goes into that link-up.   If one had to do that on an individual level, it would make bonding practically impossible.

            Modern technology doesn’t create links between people.  It mediates links.  In mediating links between people, it increases the direct linkages that are created between people and  technology.  People become linked to the process of the relating rather than the substance of the relationship.  One just has to look at how an increasing number of resources of the entrepreneurial group are going to be devoted to technology as a process for communication rather than simply as a product of a business.  The connection becomes more with the technology that is connecting rather than with the person or people at the other end of the connection.

            But can a machine without emotions act as a stabilizing agent for a person’s emotions?  I frankly don’t see how.  Machines and devices create a frictionless flow of process that prevents dangerous collisions with other figures.  The result is numbness.  Numbness is not the ideal mental state in which to form bonds with other people.  Contrast this with the stillness generated by grounding in a more traditional natural living environment or life situation.  Stillness does not mean a lack of organic stimulation and numbness.  Stillness means a lack of movement and activity in a more traditional natural situation which provides people with the opportunity to bond with another person or people.  And as was pointed out in the past, without bonding, there is no meaningful connection through family, community, friendship and romance.  And without these connections, human society cannot continue to exist.  Thus, process without substance leads to fragile mediated connections between people.  This is what is happening these days among the members of my Saturday morning entrepreneur group.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

Robots here! Robots there! Robots everywhere!

As modern technology invades more and more areas of our daily lives, we are increasingly surrounded by more and more layers of mediated experience.  All the layers of screen reality: movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones, tablets.  The Internet of Things. 3-D printing.  Artificial Intelligence.  Virtual Reality.  So many layers of mediation occupying so many layers of space and time.  And the more that we experience this increasing number of layers of mediated experience, the less we are capable of experiencing and absorbing the primary experience world of nature, more traditional living environments and organic stimulation.  And the less that we can absorb these more natural environments, the less we want to participate in them and the more we are impelled to create more devices that, in effect, replace our participation in more and more areas of primary experience work.  Because as we become more and more numb as a result of all this technological mediation, we become more and more overwhelmed by the few areas of primary experience that are left.

            Anyway, as I have discussed before, I am in an entrepreneur group that lately has been discussing more and more interventions by robotics in modern life.  In particular, two manifestations of robotics have been presented recently.  Both manifestations would eliminate a lot of human jobs at a time when millions of people have lost their jobs due to Covid 19.

            One of them is a robotic system for a fast food type restaurant that creates a completely automated kitchen and service counter.  The system cooks and prepares food as well as presenting it to the public.  There is no participation of humans in any part of the process except in perhaps turning the system on.  The man who presented his invention to the entrepreneur group declared that there has been a “breakdown” in food preparation and service in recent years and that his invention would fix the “problem”.  In the name of a supposed falloff in efficiency, the gentleman was willing to set in motion something that would eliminate a whole bunch of human jobs.  Even before the situation with Covid 19, this would have created a significant problem.  For many people, fast food restaurant jobs are the only jobs that are available given their skill sets, and in some cases, given the status of some of them as immigrants.  For other people, fast food jobs are entry level jobs that teach them about the world of work, so that they can then move on to more skilled higher paying jobs.

            A group of students brought a project to the entrepreneur group that involved a robot driving in uber-style vehicles.  This robot-driven car would be used instead of self-driving cars.  The point of it was that passengers would feel more comfortable in a car driven by a robot rather than a car driven by no one.  A robot could speak and engage passengers in some kind of small talk.  And after all, a robot was some kind of human-like entity to which a passenger could ascribe agency in controlling the vehicle.  For myself, I must confess that neither a robot driver or a self-driving car makes me feel particularly comfortable.  But again, there is the matter of all the lost jobs: Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, taxi drivers.

            For the robotics creators, humans as a whole are being implicitly looked at in terms of planned obsolescence.  Keep humans around in work only when necessary for them to do certain tasks or certain parts of tasks.  Then, as soon as the robots and machines have been tested and perfected enough for them to take over a certain job, phase out the humans.  Pretty soon, this could include practically all of us.  Which is why robotics creators have little sympathy for all the millions of people who have lost their jobs as a result of Covid 19.  The fact that if people aren’t working, they can’t afford to go to fast food restaurants or take Uber rides, just doesn’t seem to occur to the robotics people.

            Somehow, robots are more real for robotics creators than are humans.  Because if humans were considered to be really real, the robotics people would not be so interested in replacing the general population.  The robotics people should realize that not only are they taking away sources of income from human workers, their livelihoods, but also a significant purpose of living as well.  Work is not only important for economic survival, but for psychological survival as well.  Work is one of the main ways that people have to make organic imprints in order to feel alive as well as to preserve imprints in order to prepare for death with a personal surrogate immortality.  When people are unemployed, they fall into the numbing living death of an experiential vacuum.  There are few people who are able to replace work with meaningful hobbies and avocations when they retire.  Which is why so many people literally die of boredom when they retire.

            Eventually, some robotics people will create robots and machines that are smart enough to create their own diverse highly specialized robots and robotic systems, and, at that point, the robotics people themselves will be phased out.  So, at some point, the robotics people are going to have to decide which side they are on: the robots or the people.  Meantime, one might think that it is absolutely inappropriate to create robot fast-food servers and robot drivers at a time when so many people are out of work due to Covid 19.  Inappropriate?  Hell, it is absolutely obscene!

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow 

 

 

Perfection For Eternity And In The Moment

 

            Perfection is that to which we aspire in many of the phenomena in our lives, whether they be objects, activities, processes, interactions, relationships or atmospheres.  It is that which makes something flawless and complete.  It is that which makes something seem totally right for the situation.  For eternity in some situations and for precisely the moment in others.  But there are all kinds of obstacles to perfection, which is why we aspire to and maybe sometimes come close to, but seldom totally capture it.  Even in engineering, where machine parts and machine processes have to be created within the parameters of very precise measurements, it is sometimes hard to get these measurements exactly right.  In most cases, the deviations in measurements in engineering and science aren’t that important, particularly if they are very small.  But, in other cases, when they are important, deviations can lead to the wrong results in experiments or to problems in functioning in machines.

            It is much easier to even approach perfection, when dealing with situations that require objective measurements.  But in those situations that deal with how we experience something subjectively, perfection can be something that is much more difficult to pin down.  What makes for a perfect job or a perfect spouse.  What if a spouse has traits that make her or him perfect or almost perfect in one kind of life situation, but not so perfect in another.  A person who is great in verbal conversation and thus as a companion, but not so great as a lover.  What about a job that fits one’s interests and is challenging, but that is so demanding that it is very stressful and ultimately harmful to one’s health.  It gets down to that old saying “Be careful what you ask for.”

            In general, it is my belief that technology has transformed the way that we look at perfection.  In preindustrial times, when we lived closer to nature, perfection used to refer to a complete seamless phenomenon that was defined enough to prevent it from losing its sense of integrity by being enveloped, swallowed up by organic stimulation in a traditional highly grounded more natural environment.  On one level, perfection was transcendence in spiritual entities that were not susceptible to organic decay.  Religion played a very important role in terms of creating notions of perfection in traditional society.  Perfection was conceived of in terms of perfection in subject matter (a transcendently beautiful woman) or in technique.  Among the Navajo Indians, creating perfect rugs was thought of as challenging the gods, so they always purposely put in one mistake.  Perfection also entered into the area of romance, which was, in spite of what I wrote earlier in this article, an attempt to find the perfect person who complemented one in every way.  This romantic ideal was not something that the average tribesman or peasant or tradesman could afford to think about.  Rather it was an ideal that was found in the middle and upper classes of European society – people who had the leisure time to think about such perfection.  Needless to say, it probably often led to disappointment, which was why many romantics got lovers to satisfy them emotionally in ways that their spouses were not able to.  All these transcendent approaches to perfection were ways to fight off the undifferentiating effects of the intense organic stimulation found in more natural and traditional living environments.  That intense organic stimulation with all the intense manifestations of nature: vegetation, wild animals, pronounced geographical features, geological presentations and weather patterns as well as intense manifestations in traditional villages, towns and marketplaces, tended to blur the outlines of a person’s sense of self and, as it were, melt it down to a more and more primitive animal state of mind.  Even those forms of architecture that represented early attempts to create transcendence to fight undifferentiation like pyramids, churches, castles and estates and traditional cities with their more organic architecture only proved how intense the pull of the intense organic stimulation was in more traditional society.                                                

            In modern technological society, where people start to model themselves after highly defined machines, definition is not the aspect of humans that is threatened by their total living environments.  Today, the concern is with coherence, with mustering together sufficient flowing blendable continual stimuli, organic stimuli to hold oneself and one’s surroundings together.  And today, perfection can be thought of as an entity that is coherent enough to prevent it from losing its sense of integrity by randomly falling apart, crumbling apart from entropy in an experiential vacuum.  In a world where a focus on transcendent eternities means focusing on the seamless forms of modern architecture and long stretches of concrete and asphalt that wander endlessly rather than on spiritual entities and worlds, the perfection which makes us feel complete is tactile, textural and temporary.  It is good experience rather than lifeless possessions.   Perfection today is not so seamless but rather invites one to enter the experience of the phenomenon rather than to simply view it from outside.  It is a rich immanent perishable moment: a good encounter, a good adventure, a beautiful meal, terrific sex.  In a vacuumized world, the focus is on making perfect imprints rather than preserving them.  Granted that at the end of life, one has to confront the total nothingness of death without a strong surrogate immortality of preserved imprints.  But perhaps the intense memory of a rich vibrant life without many preserved imprints is in and of itself a kind of perfection that a person can carry with them to the grave.  Perhaps, there is a perfection in a life that is vulnerably perishable.  If not, the end of life for people that follow this approach has to be very difficult.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

 

 

What Is Really Being Cancelled Out With Cancel Culture

             The notion of cancel culture refers to the boycotting or shunning of someone whose behavior or speech is deemed in some way objectionable or controversial.  The boycotting or shunning can damage a person’s reputation and cause a person to lose his job.  A lot of cancel culture today is related to actions or speech that are considered racist or sexist.  And although, in its present incarnation, it started primarily as an American phenomenon, it has spread well beyond the United States.

            It is like a magnified well-organized version of giving someone the silent treatment.  When someone is given the silent treatment, it is like he is placed in a social experiential vacuum.  He is immersed in psychological numbness, because one or some of his actions or utterances is so apart from a seamless numbing normal for the people around him that it shocks them out of their own psychological numbness.  In another time and place, perhaps what the person did would not be considered such a big thing or, at worst, could be written off as an element of human imperfection that could be overcome and forgiven.  We have all done things in our past that we regret.  But in today’s world, every mistaken action or utterance is considered by others as an intolerable source of abrasive friction, an intolerable tension-pocket.

            Now I am not trying to suggest that all disapproved actions and utterances are equally forgivable.  Hate speech and acts of violence are worth taking very seriously.  On the other hand, we live in a democracy where people have the right to turn away from past mistakes and turn their lives around.  The real problem with cancel culture is that people aren’t being permitted the freedom to rise above their mistakes.

            On the other hand, we sometimes are being cancelled not because of actions or utterances demonstrating moral imperfection, but because of honest disagreements.  If a person takes unpopular views that don’t fall within the promotion of political correctness, that in and of itself can be grounds for being socially shut out of polite society.  Which means that cancel culture can act as a total damper on free speech.  Again, I am not including those examples of hate speech,    (in person or on the Internet), that directly insight people to violence.  Nevertheless, so many people are being cancelled today for honest disagreement that a real danger is being posed to our democracy.

            A democracy is based on a lively exchange of views.  And on the assumption that we all have something to learn from those with whom we disagree.  But if one is so numb that he experiences any disagreement as an overstimulating visceral threat, then the whole experience of democracy is going to be shattered.

            This kind of thinking has been present in different forms in the U.S. in the past.  It was present in the Salem witch trials.  It was present in 1954 in the McCarthy hearings.  But what makes cancel culture so different from these examples is that it is being used as a mechanism by so many different groups and individuals during the same period of time.  It is so present that many attempts at original perspectives are being threatened with being totally shut down.

            The threat of being vacuumized by cancel culture is going to have the effect of making many people feel that they have to take the politically correct line of thinking, that they have to become brittle figures in their thinking and join up with other brittle human figures in a tight bundle or else be expelled as a free-floating figure, doomed to float endlessly in the larger experiential vacuum without hope of social grounding.  It is like a form of imposed exile.

            On a deeper level, perhaps many of us feel secretly like we are deserving of cancel culture ourselves.  Cancelling ourselves becomes in a way like canceling others: an internalized source of abrasive friction, an internalized tension-pocket that acts as a vehicle for stimulating ourselves out of the numbness created by the experiential vacuum that surrounds us.  Cancel culture acts like a modern machine, an electric hammer or drill that pounds some life into us.  In other words, the concern about immoral activities or about divergent political opinions is an overlay for a deeper concern about sinking into a living death.  People can become very earnest and very self-righteous on the surface in their attempts to fight this experiential numbness.   They themselves will believe that the surface issue on which they are focusing is the real source of their public moral behavior.  Which is why, if by some chance they were able to resolve the public moral issue, they would have to find another one quickly in order to stay out of a dangerous state of numbness.

            Many people today need the abrasive friction – the tension pocket – of canceling others and themselves in order to feel alive, to pull out of their numbness.  Particularly with the additional numbness created by self-isolation as a result of the Corona virus, cancel culture has become a useful tool for dealing with our present situation.  However, it is simply one more in the list of psychological postures that have been discussed in this column, postures that are being utilized to help people deal with the experiential effects of the evolving modern technological living environments which we are all inhabiting.  And because the real cause of this posture is something distinct from the issues which it was ostensibly created to deal with, something deeper and more enduring, it is probably going to be around for a long time.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

Recreation, Work, Meditation, And Feeling Human

             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.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow