Touch Has Become So Boring

            Touching has become such a boring activity in modern technological society.  In terms of the hard things that we have to deal with such as furniture, implements and devices, everything is either made of synthetic materials or else smooth and polished natural materials.  Modern designs mean that there is a minimal amount of ornament and decoration to create interesting tactile surfaces on these things.  The aesthetics here tends to focus on the functional.  Even though clothing has tended to move away from synthetic fibers like polyester, the organic fibers that we use like cotton, wool and linen tend to be finely woven and smooth.  There are very few interesting textures in clothing anymore.

            One of the few things that is left to touch that is of any sensory interest is another person’s body, which is a major reason for why sex has become such an obsession in modern technological society.  And yet, for the most part, our sense of touch is in an experiential vacuum.  It is as if we slide off the surfaces that surround us.  It’s as if these surfaces are so protective of themselves, so ungiving, so incapable of bonding, so incapable of deep breathing.  So incapable of generating the kind of organic friction that can really stimulate a person to life.

            So incapable of providing experiential surfaces on which people can make, receive and preserve organic imprints.  Touch in more traditional societies has always been a means by which people can create instant confirmation of their participation in life events and experiences.  Instant confirmation of feeling fully alive by making imprints and preparing for death by preserving one’s imprints in such a way that one can create a surrogate immortality.

            Touch is the sensory channel most predisposed to giving and receiving flowing blendable continual stimuli.  These are the stimuli most predisposed to creating one’s sense of coherence to oneself as well as to one’s world of experience.  As we attempt to commune with the experiential surfaces that surround us, instead we discover the experiential vacuum that these surfaces are creating.  And as we experience this vacuum, we internalize it.  And then we become a part of the experiential vacuum that surrounds us.  We become more and more numb to our life force.

            In connection with touch, we frequently speak of “getting our hands dirty”.  One interpretation of this saying is that it refers to not just sitting on the sidelines and observing or even just dabbling in a project.  Rather, one should fully engage oneself in an activity, even if it is difficult and messy.  Perhaps a more literal way of interpreting the saying would mean to feel the grainy pebbly texture of the dirt in order to feel more alive.  We must be able to tolerate the rougher organic friction created by such a texture.  So many of the hard organic surfaces that we deal with today are not only smooth, but they are covered with shellac and varnish to protect and preserve them.  Such surfaces may last longer, and the things with these surfaces may last longer, but it means being shut out from the tactile stimulation that we need.

            To reiterate a theme brought up earlier in this article and also discussed in earlier articles in my column, a lack of organic stimulation from more natural and traditional living environments has led to people seeking out a variety of organic stimulation through multiple human bodies in sex.  However, the problem is not only a lack of organic stimulation from the larger total macro living environment, which frequently we experience more visually , but also a lack from the micro living environments, which have to do with the things and substance in our immediate living environment, the things and substance we touch and hold.  Such a lack of interesting organic things and substances again leads to a focus on the one kind of things and substance that is still readily available.  And not just one body in a monogamous relationship, but multiple bodies creating different textures, different forms to touch and caress.  Different sources of organic imprints both for making and receiving. And this, in turn, leads to difficulties in focusing on one person for a sustained intimate relationship. 

Another kind of problem results when we take mind-altering drugs to heighten those tactile sensations that are available in today’s living environment.  These drugs can have negative consequences both mentally and physically. 

A real access to organic tactile stimulation is very important for healthy living.  This is why tactile stimulation, the overlooked stimulation in modern technological society, is so crucial.  It contributes significantly to helping to prevent us from sinking into a deadly numbness, becoming robots and thus losing our humanity.  And it’s why it is such a dangerous sign that touch, in most areas of life today, has become so boring.

© 2019 Laurence Mesirow                                                                                                                                                     

That Which Propels Our Lives Today

            A young friend of mine in her twenties was recently discussing with me that if she decided to go to graduate school, she would like to do research into intrinsic motivators.  Her desire triggered something in me, and, although I don’t do research in the sense of traditional social science methodology, I do like to explore ideas as a social philosopher.  So I decided to anticipate my friend’s studies a little bit and explore the relationship between intrinsic motivators and modern society.

            Initially, I want to delve into not only intrinsic motivators but also instrumental motivators.  It is my contention that, as we move away from primary experience in modern technological society, we are also moving away from intrinsic motivators.  As we move away from the immediacy of experience, we also move away from the immediacy of motivation, doing things for their own sake.  When we do things for their own sake, we are doing things that stimulate us to life at the deepest levels of our being.  Things that stimulate our abilities, our  personality, our character.  Things that relate to our nature.

            All this is distinct from those things in our lives that motivate us instrumentally.  Instrumental motivators don’t take into consideration our individual natures.  They frequently take into consideration our basic survival needs and our desire for material rewards.  We work in order to make money in order to survive.  And in order to buy material products and services.  We may not enjoy the work at all.  But we do it because it is a means to an end.  Many people spend their whole adult lives in careers that they hate, but they continue in them because of the material rewards and because of the prestige attached to their careers.

            In addition, people today have to put up with the sensory distortion generated by the technology involved in so many modern professions.  The abrasive tension pockets of many machines used by so many modern factory workers.  The experiential vacuums of all the computers used by all the modern white collar workers at their desk jobs.  Overstimulation and understimulation.  Here are experiential states for which our beings were not built.  So we put up with work based on sensory distortion, work that can make us feel sensorily uncomfortable, in order to make a living and survive, and in order to enjoy the material goods and services we have come to crave.

            In today’s world, long-range planning has come to dominate the thinking of modern parents and children alike.  Particularly for middle and upper class families, a child has to go the right preschool, in order to get into the right grammar school, in order to get into the right high school, in order to get into the right college or university, in order to get into the right graduate school, in order to get the right prestigious job.  Each stage of education is increasingly dominated by its instrumentality in being able to successfully navigate the next stage of education so as to be able to ultimately achieve a successful prestigious lucrative work career.

            Granted that for many years, parents have encouraged their child to do well in school in order to help him get a good job.  But never before has competition at each stage of education been so intense.  Even extracurricular activities have to be carefully planned for maximum impact for academic admissions and corporate acceptance.  Meanwhile, it makes it much more difficult for students to live the moment and to actually enjoy and appreciate their educational experience.  Their instrumental motivators are simply too large and overwhelming, and they crush whatever intrinsic motivators may be available to fully experience.

            To a certain extent, we can say that always living for the future means that one can never be fully grounded in the present.  One is holding off fully grounding oneself in order to be able to continually impel oneself forward.  But when the first goal is temporally so far away, one has to be able to plan to hold off so many temptations to ground oneself.  The best way to do that is just to continually live in a holding pattern, to continually live in an experiential vacuum.  Continually live in a psychological state where the opportunity to take advantage of intrinsic motivators is minimal.

            Finally there are those people who don’t enjoy relationships for the intrinsic joy they bring, but only for how they are instrumental to getting access to other relationships or other life situations that offer more power.  People like this are really incapable of intimacy, incapable of getting access to emotional grounding.  As such people hop from one relationship to another, they are constantly experiencing emotional numbness from the experiential vacuum that they have created for themselves.  The people with whom they relate are simply free-floating figures who may offer access to power but no deep emotional bonding.  How can there be deep emotional bonding, when a person is being used for a shallow instrumental purpose.

            Starting with our shallow interactions with our modern technology, the shallow instrumental approach permeates how we conduct our lives and how we relate to others.  Yes, instrumental motivators have always been a part of human life to some extent, but not to the extent that they exist today.  And intrinsic motivators have been so suppressed by them that it becomes hard for many of us to know who we really are anymore and what we are really feeling.  As a result of our loss of intrinsic motivators, we are losing our capacity to feel really human.

© 2019 Laurence Mesirow

The News As A Substitute For Life

            No matter where one goes in modern technological society, it is hard to escape the news.  People are reading newspapers and magazines in some form, whether hard copy or online.  People are listening to the news on the radio and they are watching the news on television, sometimes all day on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox.  People get news from websites on the Internet and from social media like Facebook and Twitter.  And, of course, people exchange news with each other as a kind of gossip.

            In the old days, people also got news through gossip as well as through letters. Formal announcements have frequently been made by town criers in communities throughout the world.  However, learning about other people’s events and experiences did not occupy such a large chunk of one’s time the way that it does today.  As life has become more frictionless and more mediated, more passive and more reactive, people are becoming number and number.  Not enough of any significance happens to them to form the foundation of a meaningful life narrative and to stimulate them fully to life, to make and preserve organic imprints and to prepare for death with a surrogate immortality.  News allows people to experience meaningful life events vicariously, to feel, in many cases, the abrasive friction that comes from other people’s important life events.  And it allows people to experience important life events without taking the abrasive roles of putting themselves in danger or in an embarrassing situation.

            Now as people have become numb to organic stimulation, they continue to respond to the mechanical and digital stimulation of modern machines.  Although they are no longer able to fully absorb the flowing, blendable, continual stimuli from organic, natural and traditional sources, they have been reconfigured to respond to the defined discrete stimuli of all the machines that they use in daily life.  The defined discrete modalities of news items, factoids, and data are ways that people can still absorb life events and experiences as a result of their having been psychologically reconfigured from the mirroring and modeling generated by modern technological entities. These vicarious events and experiences are somehow absorbed to become a part of the news gatherer’s own life.  People talk about news items with one another as if they had participated themselves directly in the news event or news experience.

            This merging with the people involved in the news-based event or experience works in democracies and authoritarian governments in different ways.  In a democracy, the merging with important news figures is based on the notion that any citizen of a certain age has the right to run for office in government or to work and study in such a way that he can do something significant in business, law, the arts or the sciences, or any other area of life that could potentially create the opportunity for newsworthy events or experiences.  In a country with an authoritarian government , there are certainly ceilings as to how far an average person can climb in government.  To the extent there is intense political and economic inequality in such a society, there frequently can be limitations for many if not most people as to how far they can climb on the ladder of success.  In such cases, the newsmakers provide examples for those ambitious people at the bottom of the ladder.  Examples of people who can help guide any person who wishes to at least dream of being one of the important newsmakers.  In authoritarian societies, the people with power provide primarily opportunities for the average person to identify and dream, to participate in a collective surrogate immortality with all the other average people who identify and dream.  In many ways, the powerful people hold power that make them almost like human gods.

            This is a little different from democracies, where the newsmakers act as examples for people who believe they have the capacity to be their own newsmakers.  So that the identification and dreaming with the newsmakers is more fragile and more shallow.  It is more contingent.  People identify and dream with the contingency that it occurs only until they can potentially replace the newsmakers themselves.

            But the conduit to the newsmakers is the bits of news, the factoids and data that surround them.  Now Trump is very interesting because he is an authoritarian president trying to navigate his policies in a country that is still a democracy.  For his supporters, he is a classic example of a person who serves as a vehicle for the formation of a collective surrogate immortality.  His supporters look up to him and would never dream of rising to his unique level of power.  For his opponents, they challenge him as if he is an ordinary but deranged person operating on an attainable level.  And both groups receive affirmation of their points of view from the news sources that back their position.  Fox for the supporters; MSNBC and CNN for the opponents.  In other words, what we call the factoids or data or bits of news are, particularly in today’s world, influenced by the flowing blendable continual beliefs of the news stations that present them.  This gives the impact of the presentation of news an extra kick to it.  And it acts as a tool by which people can pull themselves out of their growing numbness.

            News today becomes a kind of addiction.  Some people stay glued to their 24 hour news stations or go from one news website to the next.  It becomes a means by which they can avoid the reality that they have very tenuous vacuum lives in their primary experience external worlds.  News becomes a means by which they can use emotion-arousing factoids and data to feel alive.

(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow

Being Seduced Into Giving Up One’s Control Of Things

            Driving has become more and more frictionless and more and more mediated.  From gear shift to automatic.  From manual steering to power steering.  From manual brakes to power brakes.  Then there is cruise control.  Extras like computers with G.P.S.  Greater and greater access to continual flow highways.  Less and less physical effort and fewer and fewer meaningful decisions to make.  Driving increasingly puts us in an experiential vacuum and makes us feel numb.  Unless, of course, we drive very aggressively and very fast.  Which can ultimately lead to accidents.  So numbness can lead to a hyper use of our sense of agency in order to feel alive.  This can lead to damaging and even fatal consequences.  And the reflection on this situation ultimately has led to some people creating self-driving cars.

            As human agency has become distorted from numbness, more and more people in the world of technology have decided that the solution is to minimize if not get rid of human agency.  We see this not only in self-driving cars but also in all the household appliances affected by the Internet of Things.  A voice control can set a whole bunch of appliances and mechanisms in motion in preparation for a person’s return to his house.  It is all arranged so that his home is waiting to receive him in a totally frictionless way.  The numbness created here is answered by an intense immersion in the abrasive friction of increasingly kinky programs available on the television screen, and particularly in reality television.  Here a person can vicariously engage in the hyperrealism involved in some truly bizarre competitions.  Of course, there is also the vicarious violence, the vicarious abrasive friction he can absorb in all the police dramas and all the vicarious sex discussed and available on many comedy shows and romantic dramas.  Then there is all the pornography available on the Internet as well as all the violent hate groups in which one can participate at least vicariously.

 

Both television and computers can be turned on and off and managed as part of Internet of Things systems.  Unlike self-driving cars, where the numbness can be answered by directly aggressive responses within the confines of the technology (taking back control of the car when possible and when needed), the numbness of the Internet of Things is answered by mostly vicarious aggressive responses that come from aggressive scenarios played out in screen reality.  One partial exception is that the vicarious participation in hate groups through the Internet and social media can ultimately lead to primary experience participation in hate group activities in the external world.  It is one thing to identify with a hate group through one’s mind alone.  It is another thing to commit one’s whole being to a cause through demonstrations, through violent clashes with other groups, and even through acts of terrorism.  But frequently today it can all start with sitting on one’s couch or at one’s desk and simply looking at a screen.  Loss of agency can paradoxically sometimes lead to hyperagency.

            And then, of course, there is 3D printing.  This creates numbness and takes away our agency when it comes to fabricating things.  After all, if practically everything from guns to human organs can be made relatively quickly and individually by a machine, why should humans bother with being craftspeople.  A 3D printer seduces us into passivity and complacency.  Granted that humans can still create the design, the plans for the machine production.  But this is not the same as shaping and connecting pieces of material in an operation that involves our interaction with the external world in our use of personal agency.

            Our loss of agency is particularly influenced by the effect of the ongoing use of different kinds of screens in our daily lives.  It is more difficult to bond with 2 dimensional images of people on screen than it is to bond with 3 dimensional flesh-and-blood people.  There is no flesh to hold onto literally or visually or even to touch on a screen.  No opportunities for the stereoscopic vision that gives a person almost a visual sense of touch.

            Loss of agency can be an ongoing frightening experience.  It means one feels powerless to make and preserve organic imprints.  One feels powerless to make the imprints that help a person to feel alive.  And one feels powerless to preserve some of those imprints in such a way as to create a personal surrogate immortality and prepare for death.  In short, one feels powerless to create a meaningful life narrative that is the foundation for validating one’s existence on earth.  Without a meaningful life narrative, life can become empty.

            Loss of agency is a consequence of the excessive frictionlessness and mediation in modern society that I have been talking about.  It is an aspect of the growing numbness that has become an increasingly influential layer in our modern state of mind.

            What can we do to gain back a sense of agency?  For one thing, make a personal effort to not give up all of one’s daily life tasks to technological improvements.  Easier is not always better, if it is going to contribute to a sense of powerlessness.  Also, try to diminish as much as possible the amount of time one spends in front of modern technological screens and increasingly in virtual reality.  Turn as many of one’s daily life experiences into primary experiences as possible.  In particular, try doing more things and making more things instead of watching more things.  In other words, one has to make oneself a stereoscopic entity by moving through the 3 dimensional process of primary experience in the external world.  When one is constantly watching 2 dimensional flat screens, one becomes flat and 2 dimensional oneself.  And there is no meaningful power, no meaningful agency in feeling and being flat.

(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow

Living Life Without Devices

            I spend so much time focusing on the negative in this column and not enough focusing on the positive, on the potential solutions to many of our emotional and behavioral problems today.  I guess I have felt that many of our problems lie in areas of life that are not usually taken into account in trying to deal with the problems and, therefore, these areas had to be unpacked as thoroughly and as extensively as possible.  Nevertheless, I feel that now is a moment to dedicate some time to the type of life experience to which we should aspire in terms of making our lives more healthy.

            The terms organic experience, natural experience, immediate experience and primary experience have been used to describe the kind of life experience we are increasingly losing as natural environments and more traditional living environments get converted to farms, as farmland gets converted to shopping centers, housing developments and other kinds of more heavily inhabited areas, and most important as more and more of what we do gets mediated by modern technology.  What we have lost is not only primary sources of organic stimulation - what I have also call flowing blendable continual stimuli - but also opportunities for intense interactions with the organic phenomena that surround us in the external world.  These sources of organic stimulation require a sense of surrender and immersion on the part of people in order to absorb them and experience them.  But people in modern technological society are so used to the modalities of control and manipulation and so afraid of the sense of vulnerability that would come with the postures of surrender and immersion, that it is very difficult for them to fully open up to this posture even when organic stimulation and opportunities for intense intimate interactions are available.  People today feel much more comfortable with postures of control and manipulation that come with the defined discrete technological stimuli that they have created in order to protect themselves from the dangers of organic perishability that are found in nature.  All the natural catastrophes: the hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and famines; the wild animals and diseases – these are what have motivated human beings to create the technology that protects them from these random dangerous natural experiences.

            Unfortunately, the protections that humans have developed have led to throwing the baby out with the bath waters.  Humans are becoming increasingly incapable of and uncomfortable with the intense intimate interactions that are the means by which they apprehend primary experience, the organic experience that is something they so desperately crave because it forms such an integral part of their life narratives as human beings.  It is almost as if humans have developed an auto-immune response to something that is intrinsically a part of their lives, turning against an aspect of their lives that they need in order to survive.

            In other words, our superficial adaptation to modern technology has come at a significant price.  We no longer feel very comfortable with that with which we should feel comfortable.  So re-adjusting to that which used to be the foundation of human existence will not be easy.  Yet if we want to survive as a human race, it has to be done.  If there aren’t a lot of opportunities for organic experience, they have to somehow be created.  Not only more patches of nature and more traditional architecture in which to move around, but also more physical activities that involve simple tools and simple toys.  Gradually weaning ourselves from the mediated frictionless screen realities of movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones and tablets.  And also the increasingly prevalent mediated frictionless virtual reality games.  Little by little, getting more and more involved in sports, gardening, art, music, hiking, social clubs, community service groups and other kinds of hobbies and avocations.  Activities that help us to pull out of the sensory distortion that is so much a part of our living environments today and our daily lives.

            Changing our states of mind, our consciousnesses, won’t happen all at once.  And anyway we aren’t going to be able to get to the levels of primary experience that our ancestors had, if only because primary experience is probably not going to create any kind of foundation for the economic survival of most of us in the foreseeable future.  Our desire to immerse ourselves more in organic experience will be based on free choice and not necessity.

            One could imagine at least one way in which the mediated experience of technology may even ultimately lead to our immersing ourselves in new kinds of immediate experience.  I am thinking of how technology in the form of space ships could lead to an extensive exploration of outer space, our solar system and other solar systems.  Humans have already gone to the moon and lived on space stations.  Soon we will go to Mars and who knows where else.  Maybe we will end up destroying our planet in the process of protecting ourselves from the organic perishability of nature.  And then we will have to move to other faraway planets, in order to survive.   Ideally, we will try to find planets with similar atmospheres and similar climates, so that we don’t have to walk around in space suits all the time, which, of course, we would have to use on Mars.

            Maybe humans, in order to escape a dying earth, will have to fly around in the mediated experience of large space ships that are ample enough to serve as space communities, as we search for hospitable planets.  Sort of like what we see on science fiction movies and television series.  This would be one of the uses of modern technology that I would strongly applaud.  Mediated experiences in the service of primary experience.  Not something that is possible very often.

            In the meantime, we have to get creative in generating good sources of primary experience here on good old planet earth.  Our survival depends on it.

© 2019 Laurence Mesirow

Is Emptiness A Part Of Paradise?

            Perhaps it is since the Enlightenment that the concept of Individualism has permeated so much of Western society and later industrialized non-Western societies. Once one believes in the importance of the individual and at least freedom in some areas of life, one also believes in the possibility of economic advancement and, in particular, the notion that one’s children should have it easier than their parents did.  And easier automatically means better today.  Easier means not only greater material comfort but also greater opportunity to purchase more expensive technology that makes life more frictionless and more safely mediated, not only from danger but from many forms of excessive uncomfortable organic stimulation, such as manual labor and pre-automotive transportation.  And for many middle-class parents today, children are looked at as precious creatures to be protected by keeping them in a technology-based bubble.

Yet here is exactly what contributes to so many of the different modern behavior pathologies that we see exhibited.  Particularly young people need a certain amount of sustained organic friction in order to grow into a fully conscious human being, capable of making and preserving meaningful organic imprints, in order to feely fully alive and in order to create a surrogate immortality in preparation for death.  A living environment that generates organic friction is one that provides traction for a person’s sequence of activities, whether work-related, recreational, familial, community-based or romantic.  Such a living environment creates a template for human beings to be able to fully interact with one another.

            Today so much of the external world stimulation that people experience is the abrasive tension-pocket friction that comes from modern waste products - noise pollution, overpopulated living spaces, air pollution, accelerated mechanical processes like speeding cars - as well as modern kicks – motorcycles, race cars, strobe lights, and electronic musical instruments.  None of this abrasive friction is stimulation that the human nervous system is built to fully absorb.  Noise pollution and electronic musical instruments can cause a person to go deaf while still young.  Strobe lights create light pollution that can cause seizures, vertigo, and migraine headaches.  Motorcycles and race cars create abrasive overpowering noise that again can hurt a person’s ears.  And all these abrasive stimuli are psychologically disruptive and disorienting.  They impact both self-definition and self-coherence.  The overstimulation generated affects a person’s capacity to function and to make and preserve organic imprints much the way the numbness created by the larger experiential vacuum does.  Today, it is either understimulation or overstimulation.  Both have replaced the organic fields of experience that used to create surfaces on which to operate with lots of traction.

            Lacking organic traction leads to people engaging in all kinds of extreme abrasive behavior in order to pull themselves out of numbness and in order to generate an internal abrasive stimulation that they themselves can control so that they can drive out the external abrasive friction that they can’t control .  A loss of organic traction leads to a sense of powerlessness and impotency.  This in turn leads to an incapacity to feel fully alive and prepare for death.  The whole purpose of being, the whole mission of life is upended.  A loss of organic traction leads to some people wanting to kill themselves and to other people wanting to kill others in order to feel alive and thus create a surrogate purpose of being.  The more all of us lose our traction, the more some of us are going to seek solutions that involve someone dying.  And this is unfortunately why mass shootings are occurring with greater and greater frequency in the United States.

            Many of the mass shooters use particular targets like certain ethnic groups or LGBTQ people to help focus the internal aggressive stimuli that they have generated.  Perhaps these people should be considered to be people who are somehow transitioning from the old crimes of passion of more traditional living environments to the modern crimes of numbness of modern technological living environments.  Perhaps it is simply the modern experiential vacuum that creates the great frustration.  These people feel the lack of feeling powerful and potent in their everyday lives.

            At any rate, if we want to create more traction for people to feel alive and to prepare for death, we have to stop always focusing on making life easier by making life more frictionless and more mediated through new technology.  And we have to start instilling attitudes that are geared to embracing interesting forms of primary experience that can be integrated into everyday life.  Unusual adventures, particularly connected to travel can be good, but said adventures are usually few and far between.  We have to find a way to cultivate patches of more organic fields of experience that can become a part of one’s everyday routine.  Doing the arts, playing sports and when possible in natural surroundings, doing maintenance projects connected with the home, participating actively in social groups, working in community organizations, taking long walks in the park – all involve a certain direct engagement with the external world.  By contrast, one should try to minimize one’s involvement with the plethora of mediated experiences that are available – movies, television, video games, computers, smartphone, tablets and now virtual reality games.  And also minimize one’s involvement with all the new technology that is used to make daily life more frictionless - things like the Internet of Things and 3D printing.  No, I’m not trying to get rid of all technology.  I’m just saying that we have to perhaps accept that for all the good that it has seemed to bring people, that modern technology also has a very dark side in terms of the way that it distorts how we experience the world.  And this distortion has subtle but very destructive effects that could be extremely harmful to the human race in the long run.

            If there is one area of life where the option to minimize contact with modern technology is most readily available it is in the area of recreation.  More and more work activities today involve the participation of modern technology whether computers or factory machinery.  But in the area of recreation, we can choose to engage in activities that involve primary experience rather than technologically mediated experience.  The arts, sports, outdoor activities involving communing with nature, social activities and at least some aspects of travel for pleasure all involve a greater immersion in primary experience and a minimum utilization of modern technology  All of them can help us to maintain our humanity in a world that wants to turn us into robots.

(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow

Being A Space Traveler In Your Own Space

            Virtual reality is something that has been discussed several times in this column, and it is becoming an increasingly important mode of life experience in today’s society. Initially, it has involved more perceptual experience and movements of the head and hands.  In a new device being developed called Kat Loco, the focus is on the feet and moving in place to give the illusion of locomotion.  So if one is playing a shooting game, walking or jogging in place can give the illusion of moving around a virtual space where the shoot-out is occurring.  This is done by the attachment of three sensors to the person: two to the ankle and one to the waist.  They transport a person into an alternate world, where the movements of his feet in one location give him the sensation that he is actually moving through space.

            Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?  But basically it is the experiential equivalent of empty calories.  One is not even leaving a true mechanical marking on the surface of one’s fields of experience, let alone an organic imprint.  One is spending a lot of time in a living reenactment of a video game and not making or preserving any organic imprints.  And of course, without preserved organic imprints, one is not creating a surrogate immortality and not preparing for death.

            And spending so much time in a virtual video game world will ultimately lead to the blurring of virtual reality with external world reality.  It will lead to the vacuumization of normal daily life experience.  People will become too numb to be able to involve themselves in bonded relationships with others.  People will lose their capacity for empathy and will find it easy psychologically to hurt other people as a vehicle for generating abrasive friction inside of themselves in order to pull themselves out of the numbness they have been sucked into.

            Being able to move one’s feet through space in a virtual reality world is one more channel of stimulation to give a person the impression that he is actually exerting some meaningful control over his vacuumized field of experience.  But it is a false sense of control, because whatever impact he has on the metaphorical furniture of his virtual world does not endure beyond the game.  And yet the game is compelling and impelling and almost makes a player feel as if he is involved in a real adventure on a quest.  It is enveloping and has the feeling of a kind of work.  As virtual and external world reality blur, so also do game and work realities.  Now granted there are plenty of people who make their living playing games.  But external world games are set apart in their character from normal work activities.  They don’t invade the space of normal work activities the way that virtual games can.

            So many of the life processes in virtual reality games imitate the life processes in external world reality, only without the organic stimulation and without the grounding in a field of experience that has mass, matter, and substance.  Kat Loco makes the imitation of these life processes even easier than that from previous encounters with virtual reality phenomena.  This is so different from the strategies created for playing more traditional games in external world reality.  With Kat Loco, there could come a time when a person might have trouble determining in his mind whether he is in external world reality or virtual reality.  This could have terrible consequences.

In a virtual reality game, a person could kill an adversary without any moral qualms, because he knows that the adversary is a vacuumized entity that lacks mass, matter, and substance and that doesn’t have a meaningful independent existence apart from a human’s experience of it.  From the point of view of external world reality, the vacuumized humans, animals and creatures of virtual reality don’t really exist.  They are merely a shadow of existence.

            People who have a fragile connection to external world reality are frequently considered to be psychotic in modern technological society.  Large doses of virtual reality may eventually end up pushing a lot of people into a psychotic state of mind.  Only here the dichotomy that will be causing people trouble will be not so much truth vs. fantasy but rather external world reality vs. virtual reality.  There is also a dichotomy between external world reality and screen reality, but screen reality is not so effective a replacement for external world reality as is virtual reality.  After all, screen reality is always framed by external world reality.  Virtual reality is not.  It truly appears to exist as a complete field of experience.

            With Kat Loco, a major problem has been solved in the experiential placement of human beings into a virtual reality world.  A person can walk in place and experience himself moving through an alternate reality.  An alternate reality where he can experience himself as making and preserving faux meaningful imprints by carrying out what, on one hand, he can consider to be heroic actions in heroic conflicts.  It is the complete alternate mission in an alternate world.  The only problem is that none of these apparent imprints truly stick, because there is no mass, matter or substance to absorb the imprints.  Get out of the virtual reality device, and all traces of what the person carried out also disappear.  Again, it is the experiential equivalent of empty calories.

            What will happen to today’s youth who spend a growing amount of time in virtual reality games as they grow up.  Not only will they one day discover how much time they have wasted that could have been spent making and preserving real organic imprints in order to feel fully alive and to prepare for death, but they will experience themselves as being more detached from external world reality on an ongoing basis.  Which will impair their capacity to carry out the real business of the real external world.  So if young people continue to immerse themselves in virtual reality games, the very foundation of society and civilization could be affected.  It’s something to think about when Kat Loco becomes commercially available.  Run away from it using your feet in external world reality.

© 2019 Laurence Mesirow