Social media pornography, winds of fashion, slowing down
Do you experience a certain pressure to be exceptional? To have fun or be productive all the time? I definitely do. This seems to me a pretty big aspect of social media, though I wouldn't say it was consciously devised, it's more like a consequence of what gets shared the most. The internet tends to promote the outliers — good or bad — simply because they're the most interesting. The most exceptionally skilled people, or who lead the weirdest lives, or who share absolutely unhinged views about things or people, or who are constantly traveling and "having fun".
The thing however is that because social media only captures snapshots of a surface layer of life, what it portrays is absolutely not real life, and not even the real lives of those who perform on those platforms. In an important sense, social media strikes me as promoting a form of pornography. Productivity porn. Advice porn. Outrage porn. Happiness porn. Charity porn. And of course straight up pornography.
Pornography is the manufactured attraction of the unreal, which in the process loses all authenticity, subtlety, and ultimately, quality. It titillates and dissociates, rather than slows down consciousness, which could allow it to experience something fully, in all its subtlety. It makes people stuck in their fantasies, anxious and desperate to feel good.
Images are particularly good at pornography, both in the usual sense and the broader sense of that term which I've been discussing so far, because they're so easy to scroll through and get a strong impression from. That's why it's vital to me to curate what images actually reach my experience. Honestly, there is something to be said about quitting all of social media altogether, though I'm sure there are other, softer possibilities as well: disabling images on twitter (I know it's possible on mobile, but I haven't found how on desktop), following better people and sticking to the "Following" feed. 1
All in all, that kind of subconscious influence is too powerful in my experience. Better see the dynamics of social media for what they are, and remove the toxic side as much as possible.
And what results from this pressure and the dissonance with my life is a form of self-bullying, which includes bullying myself into working on my projects, and even into having fun! Yeah, as twisted as that sounds, I was trying to force myself to do things which were supposed to be “fun”. I'll let you figure out how that panned out.
In hindsight it's sort of obvious that there are many things that cannot be forced, and instead the resistance can only be dissolved. But the thing about desperation is that it tends to lead to more desperation, control and hardening tend to lead to more control and hardening. And I guess what helped me open up to the self-bullying, the embarrassing fact that I was trying to force myself to have fun, is that it straight up didn't work.
The world we live is all about pursuing peak experiences that are outside of oneself. But those peak experiences can never be sustained, they're just temporary highs. And the thing about highs, in the pleasure-boredom spectrum, is that they inevitably create a low sooner or later. As Darren Allen points out, the gap between the high and the corresponding low is just long enough that we can no longer track what caused it. As such, it feels like the bad mood "comes out of nowhere", when in reality it is directly caused by various binges: TV, porn, social media, video games, food, drugs, sugar, alcohol, etc.
There is another form of enjoyment, which is more like opening up yourself to what is currently unfolding, allowing yourself to rest 2 and take in the goodness of life. The quest of pleasure is needy, and tightens your attention onto things, whereas that more subtle form of enjoyment is about broadening attention, opening up to the whole experience. Like all subtle things, the distinction is meant to be a pointer to a distinction in lived experience, and it's not something that can be forced.
Twitter makes you anxious because it’s a steady stream of open loops and potentially actionable material that overflows your mental inbox. Your psyche thinks it’s getting assigned a todo list it can never complete, (esp if you follow good accounts) while drowning in “unreads”.
— Daniel Kazandjian 3
I find that in digital environments, the ability to hold strong mental boundaries, i.e. boundaries in one's mind, becomes incredibly important to manage your time and energy. For instance:
All the sub-skills blend into one another, such that getting better at prioritizing means you'll discard projects or notes that don't really matter, such that it is easier to complete your projects, both in the real world and in your mind, and easier to shut down at night when you need to sleep.
I find that minimizing is really the best way to start with a better mental hygiene, though you might find some resistance. In my case, I had a severe case of bookmark and note hoarding, which I understood the root cause after several years: a part of me was trying to control my life by acquiring a lot of knowledge. Of course, this doesn't work, but my controlling mind believed it more and more. “Just one more video, just one more book, and surely I won't have to feel scared anymore!”
As a result, I decided to cut out a bunch of stuff if it wasn't obvious that it was useful in my life, and if I did find the general direction of an idea to be useful, I would keep a few pointers in folders or notes that are for later. What you find is that most things aren't super important to keep. The things you really learn are from personal experience anyway, and there is no way of living that prevents failures and suffering. Better to focus on avoiding the biggest traps in life, those that create really awful situations that require many years to get yourself out of. Most problems or traps are not like that, so stressing too much about avoiding every single of them will very likely only lead in paralysis and fear.
To conclude and see the importance of all of this, here are some failure modes and consequences of poor mental boundaries:
The culture of peers, i.e. only spending time with people the same age at you, is utterly insane and absolutely unsustainable. It's sort of obvious when you really zoom out from our world, where insane coercive structures dominate our lives, but let me make it explicit.
The fact that school separates adults from children is considered “normal”, in the same way that a vast majority of people being utterly unable to provide for their own needs is normal — food, clothing, housing, transportation being the main ones, but certainly not the only ones — i.e. it's normal for the system which dictates our lives, but certainly not healthy.
When children spend time without adults, they lose out on safety and perspective, which they will constantly look elsewhere. Because our world is digitalized, this is probably where they'll look for those: safety through distraction, entertainment and mass media, perspective through motivational videos, self-help writers, etc. But none of those are wholesome because they're utterly devoid of any context, and instead are promoted solely based on their ability to capture a lot of attention.
When adults spend time without children, they forget the joys of innocent living, and also of living for something more than just attending to your selfish needs, which can be observed from the decline of parenting. Ironically, not having children tends to make adults more child-like, and reinforces a culture obsessed with pleasure and feeling good all the time — in the pornographic sense as previously discussed.
It is true that the unquestionable authority of the family opened the gate to many incredibly toxic dynamics, and no doubt that we benefited from loosening its grip on our lives. But the opposite of a bad and old idea is never a good one, in fact it's often quite significantly worse, because at least old ideas have passed the test of time enough to remain up until now. It doesn't mean they are great for allowing humans to thrive, but at least they are good enough to help them survive over a long period of time.
The culture of peers on the other hand leads to widening communication gaps across the vertical axis, i.e. generations, an increasingly childish and self-obsessed social environment, an atomization of life, a ramping up of echo chambers, and a rising number of young people utterly disconnected from any wisdom or real safety.
And all in the name of what? So that children can be conditioned at an early age to put the demands of the system above their own needs? So that they may be coerced into passively listening dull lessons for 8 hours a day, working away at meaningless assignments?
The winds of fashion dictate everything around me.
They call it "culture", but something entirely devoid of any roots could never be called so. It is fueled by mimesis: people copying others who copy others who copy others who ... One day everyone is into X. The next day, those same people point out how X is obviously cringe and have moved on to the clearly superior Y. The day after, the cycle repeats, and no one notices how fickle the whole thing is.
In such an environment, the only sensible thing is to slow down and see what actually remains after the winds of fashion have long gone. When everyone worries about speed and the quantity of experience, then the value of direction and quality of experience increase tremendously.
Similar to fashion is the current thing. In the global news we have wars of course, but what about the things closer to the private sphere? Right now the Euro football cup is happening — or soccer for the Americans — which makes me think about how little agency modern people have in their lives that they get that invested in complete strangers playing a sport game in the name of a country.
I think Darren Allen is completely right to say that the reason why sports are promoted by the system is because they are ultimately harmless to it. 4 It's like a modern version of the arena, albeit without any of the violence, but the dynamics remain the same: the spectacle and the entertainment, the people to root for and antagonize, and the excess energy and frustration of the masses being channeled into said spectacle. 5
There are certainly forms of virtue needed to partake — not on the spectating side — in sports. It is true that they require a lot of hard work, it is true that promote teamwork, and it is true that here and there we find displays of genuine sportsmanship, but ultimately those qualities are only allowed because sports are utterly meaningless, and thus has no chance whatsoever to disrupt the system.
Having people who work hard, work together and show compassion to one another, but who want nothing to do with the system, is the worst possible scenario from its point of view. Thus there are two main strategies it uses depending on the type of people: 1) make people so passive and impotent that the only thing they do is spectate others who have more agency and 2) only allow the people with ambition and work ethics to excel at utterly meaningless activities, or in other cases like business, tasks that benefit the system. Those two main strategies lead to the two sides of the spectacle of sports.
As always, the system isn't perfect, which is why we do see individuals who talk about the fundamental problems of society, and talk about the changes needed for growth in life. But by large, it is rather astounding how incredibly effective the system is at channeling attention on things that fundamentally cannot alter it, the main type being things that don't matter at all, such that people never examine their life.
There is always something suspicious about trends that get everyone to talk and react, because it means that people stop listening and examining what really matters. The main form of control of the modern system doesn't consist in hiding information, but instead in drowning the important conversations under a sea of trivial but emotionally gripping gossip, and in making people within the system so impotent and passive that they cannot even think of something better to do than sit down in front of a television and watch sports.
On a similar note: the times are urgent, so let us slow down.
The problem with collective “solutions” to our problems is that they're all reactions. Reactions to problems caused by other reactions. A mechanical world creates mechanical people who can only react.
So slow down. Nothing important gets solved by hurrying more and more.
What do you get paid for in your job specifically? Because of how bullshit jobs are these days, I think the only thing that can be said for sure, is that you get paid for killing your dreams.
People with dreams actually have something they want out of life, thus they are significantly more prone to resist restrictions on freedom. This isn't good for the system. It is very unlikely that the interests of free people happen to align with the ones of the system. Thus dreams and conscious living aren't allowed to exist.
People who have no internal life, such that they genuinely wouldn't know what to do with their time if they didn't have a job, i.e. people-machines, are great for the system. People who believe in airy fairy things like dreams, and of something beyond utilitarianism or merely living for one's comfort, those people aren't good for the system. Thus what you get paid for is killing your dreams, which is really killing your life in an important way.
Here are some completely unsolicited and enlightened advice for people reading this:
It's always surprising to see some aspects of our society which transpire honesty. For instance, the term “human resources”, which explicitly admits that human beings are yet another resource in a company's quest for profits. Or “free time”, which implies, very correctly, that work time is not free.
Personally, if every word could get the same treatment, I would see it as an improvement. If I'm going to live in a cage, I would prefer if everyone was honest about it, even if no one did anything to change it.
It is often said that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. It is worth tracking how most people also vastly underestimate even the linear function, when it keeps running over a long period of time. For instance, 20 minutes a day is already more than 2 hours a week already, 10 hours a month, and 120 hours a year! You can make a decent bit of progress in just a few weeks for most things at that rate.
I believe that even the linear function is not well understood because having a long time horizon is not common. Most people don't do things over 7, 10, 15 or 20 years, so they never experience how radically different their life can become from small habits. Walking every day for 20min doesn't sound like it could produce significant results, and yet, when you think about all the following benefits:
Good habits build up pretty significant abilities and open up new pathways in a matter of months, and within a few years you've become in many ways a new person. In that regard, it is somewhat of a shame that we tend to judge our life trajectory based on feeling better than the last day, as opposed to carefully draw out trends that span weeks, months or even years. Change takes time, and even on a positive trend there are bad days. As such, the people who understand linear returns over a long period of time are quite rare.
But even on a short term basis, without including all the long term project management, it is rather remarkable how much you can do in a 5 or 7 minutes focused productivity dash. The practice is very simple: write down one thing 6 you want to do, and why it is important. Then break it down into atomic steps, i.e. the physical action you do. So instead of writing down “work on essay”, instead write down: 1. open up text editor 2. Open document X 3. Scan through chapter 7 of that document 4. See what points are interesting enough to add to my text 5. Write down those main points in my text editor 6. Pick one of them and elaborate into a paragraph
The first actions definitely need to be very small and very explicit in order to get through the first minutes, which are the hardest because of friction and our tendency to not enjoy effort. As you build momentum you might find yourself more hindered by the process of describing what you want to do in such specific ways, as opposed to simply doing the things you want. But then again, if you find yourself losing momentum, it might be worthwhile to once again break tasks into small, explicit, physical actions.
Not everything can be accomplished within the span of a 7 minutes dash, but it is quite astounding how much headway you can make by being totally focused during that small period of time, by virtue of having removed all the decisions and simply focusing on what needs to be done. For instance, I write these journals while I am at work, in the cracks of time between tasks, and I find it incredibly pleasant to write once I know what I want to talk about.
Another aspect that helps with productivity is to make it easier for your future self: list out what is done, what is half-done and important, and what is nice to finish but not essential. Also, make your documents more pleasant to scan through, which can include making them more visually attractive, and better separated in terms of ideas, i.e. not an indigestible slab of text with no rhythm and spacing.
Bigger projects are essentially relay races with yourself, but at different points in time. The different ‘you’s will be more or less tired, more or less motivated, and ultimately, they are not the current ‘you’. It is important to remind yourself what is important, what direction you want to take something, what is the minimum viable product and what are the nice but non-essential touches to have, etc.
Some places feel stuck in time, especially online “places”. It is not always as explicit as people trying to cling on to childhood memories, like the games they used to play, though it can be. Or the forms of media that constantly recapitulate teenagers going through school, or some variant of that, by adding superpowers or something along the lines.
Sometimes, it is a bit more subtle, such as people obsessed with healing themselves or seeing new possibilities in their life, but never really looking ahead and seeing what they'll do with it. Don't get me wrong, those things can be great, but only if they serve something broader no? What is the point of spinning endlessly in your own inner world, introspecting, meditating, doing shadow work, etc. What does it amount to if you're afraid of taking the leap and committing to real relationships, actually working on your own projects, etc?
Being stuck in time has the benefit of not having to change, which is painful, but it is pretty much always more painful to remain stuck and come to that realization down the line. I think the difference between being on a path or being stuck in time is that ultimately growth on a path is bottlenecked by time and work, whereas being stuck in time is bottlenecked by fear.
It happens to everyone, so I am not claiming to be above it, but it is worth making the distinction because there are many problems in life which aren't solved by learning new stuff. At some points, a leap has to be made, and by the very nature of leaps, it doesn't feel comfortable and it is certainly not predictable.
So I guess a way to practice those leaps is to be spontaneous in small ways, even if they don't matter a great deal. Having more and more unscheduled time, spending time in different places — preferably outside — running small experiments of vibes you want to bring in your life, move from text messages to calls, etc.
The greatest heuristic of someone's understanding of relationships, including the one between collective and the individual, is really their love life, and their sexual life. This idea that you can “solve” human relationships within society, purely with your mind and the theories it produces, without having a beautiful love and sexual life yourself is such a load of bullshit. 7
There is no smaller collective than the one made of two people, and if that tiny, tiny collective, of which you have the most control over, and which provides the most bliss when it works well, is already dysfunctional — which includes sexual repression and distancing yourself from your partner so that you never notice problems — then clearly there is something wrong with your life, and the ideas which are downstream of it.
Some people might call this an ad hominem, but at some point you have to take a look at the fruits, or lack thereof, produced by a tree. Because what else are you going to examine? The validity of ideas? People only listen to the ideas that reaffirm their emotional inner world and the echo chamber they live in. This includes the idea that we can examine ideas independently of our lives. This idea about ideas has a great emotional appeal, because it means that one can completely relinquish any form of responsibility, and give up a way of life that reaches outside the shell of self, i.e. a life aligned with love.
Do you ever get this weird realization, looking at something utterly “mundane”, and then have this sense that it isn't mundane at all. For instance:
Bob looked in Alice's eyes for long enough to express the fact that he was about to say something important. He was reenacting what he was about to say in his head, to the point that the silence between them lasted a few seconds too many, and as a result, Bob hastily started his confession.
“I love you Alice. By that I mean that I have gathered enough evidence to suggest that you would make a good mate. My priors of you were most positive, and I find your refusal to engage with anything you cannot rationally explain away to be most compatible with my views. So all this to say that it is more accurate to say that I believe I love you, and I am confident that it would be mutually beneficial for us to spend time with one another, mate and reproduce.”
Just doesn't feel the same does it?
1 There is a great addon for twitter that eliminates many annoying features, including the "For you" timeline. It’s called “Minimal Twitter” and you can find it here.
2 Which is something that many people are terrified of doing, or I guess non-doing.
4 See The Surrogate of Sport from his book Ad Radicem.
5 I guess another way to see sports, more specifically the annual, biennial (every 2 years) or quadrennial big events, is that they’re the modern equivalent of a ritual, a way of gathering with friends and celebrating something together. Still, this is another sad reflection of the fact that our culture is so empty that there is nothing real to celebrate over — unlike the older ones related to religion, agriculture or nature — that watching total strangers play a game of football is worth traveling for. But still, a sad excuse to spend time with friends sounds a lot better to me than a spectacle to fill one’s time out of sheer boredom.
6 It might be worthwhile to list out the main things that occupy your headspace, and then picking out the one that feels rather important, so that you know you aren't missing anything important.
7 This is written by someone whose love life is rather empty by the way. Though I know enough about the mind to see that the mind is utterly unable to address questions of real importance by itself. This is not meant to be a moralizing piece, this is a piece about what matters. Relationships matter more than ideas.
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2024-06-21