Radio Solitude

The world wins this round

I think I’m done for now. Like any fun ride, it eventually breaks down and requires maintenance or mothballing.

To poorly paraphrase Martin Laird, what we actually experience in the physical world is often not our true source of pain and suffering. It is the stories we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing that causes it. Getting caught in these stories we tell ourselves is a mind game that leads nowhere good and nowhere real.

Keep on being awesome.

Book Get!

Finally got a copy of Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Appropriate timing given current events. If you can find a copy near you, give it a read.

Selected quotes:

• “One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.”
• “The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat. A pretended nonviolence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual instead of physical attack is little more than a confession of weakness.”
• “We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity.”

Badge Anxiety

One active behavioral enemy of a more peaceful, unhurried solitude is “undone things.” More specifically, their omnipresent reminders.

Email unread, news unchecked, flashing notifications still flashing, simple and immediate errands pending… Leaving anything unfinished that could be finished in a ‘matter of moments’ is a deadly cloud of distraction.

I would say that whether we have more distractions today (than when?) is not the relevant consideration here. Rather, our distractions — many of which we ‘keep up with’ willingly — are easier to gratify with immediacy. Checking email takes less effort and time than checking the snail mail. Checking text messages takes less time, effort, and murderous rage than checking voice mail.  With immediacy comes a sense of (false) urgency. We never want to miss a single thing, and end up missing only the big, important things. All the small stuff? Yeah, we’re on top of that. Gotta know what’s trending (a rigged game if there ever was one, made more apparent by certain topics conspicously absent from Trending Topics these past few weeks).

Even if we know, intellectually, that a numbered badge simply means “this number of things left,” it produces anxiety and urgency. We know these things can and should wait. There is no true urgency to this notification. But we check it, flipping our mental reward levers like any other Skinner Box champion. We are not as smart as our reward reflexes.

Like attracts like with innumerable “unchecked, undone, unfinished” inputs, and the increasing false urgency to send out a response in turn and in pace. Like attracts like, until this cycle consumes itself and we are left simply burnt out, incapable of processing — or simply enjoying — any new inputs to our frazzled senses and overstimulated mind.

But of course, we adapt over time. Our tolerances seem to grow, and we start the cycle anew… And go deeper each time. This, of course, is also a very poor description of the addiction cycle.

Nobody with a functioning nervous system and basic awareness is immune, I imagine. But as we entrain ourselves into this cycle, we have the potential to train ourselves out of it, or at least to find a median while still engaging with this ‘modern world’ we refuse to turn our backs on.

Fill your head with your own thoughts from time to time, eh? Even as we know them to be heavily influenced by each and every media channel we tap into, that awareness must start somewhere.

Consumption of News: By Us, Of Us

It’s a tricky decision to consume news in the morning or evening… Or preferably, even less frequent than that. The world looks so very different after the dust settles.

“Consumption” in this case is eerily appropriate. Do you want to start off the day by filling your conscious mind with the thoughts and opinions of others? Or do you want to end the day doing the same?

There is little reason to actively avoid knowing “what’s going on,” perhaps — that’s just part of being a global citizen these days (so goes the assumption that you can actually find truths in reporting through normal channels without doing the footwork yourself). Between traditional media channels and the egosphere of personalized aggregators like RSS feeds that never stray outside of your interest boundaries, where the heck do we begin to construct our own sense of “what’s going on?”

Knowing your biases is a first step, to be sure. But then you start adding sources that you know you disagree with (not a bad thing) just so you can disagree with them **and** feel as though you’re stretching a little. Think about it… Isn’t that intellectually dishonest by just a _smidgen_? Do you use these alternative views to **only** compare against your preferred sources? Or do you follow up on items that aren’t even discussed elsewhere in your selected readings?

Try this ultimate horror: Ask someone else to suggest a few sources without the ability to turn them down.

Of course, this all assumes that consuming “news” is a good thing in most circumstances. I can’t say I am firmly convinced of that, but at the same time I can’t allow myself to revel in ignorance of any kind. An opinion has won out here, and I am pretty sure it wasn’t an original of mine.

• Don’t be incurious. 
• Know whose footprints are being left on your mind.
• Never revel in ignorance.
• Always be ready to unplug.