Dinkaltranen

You’re on drugs. Well, not technically, you’re not. But you might as well be. You’re a drug addict in the sense that Psychologists identify the purpose of an activity, as opposed to overly paying attention to the behaviour itself.

Don’t worry though. As we established in the last entry, when close to the majority of a population engages in a behaviour it’s no longer considered pathological, even if it is harmful to the patient and the people around them. The Aztecs thought pulling the hearts out of living children was good enough that basically the entire civilisation got involved under the assumption that it would somehow improve their agriculture.

How do you start your day? Some tea? A cigarette? No, sorry, it’s not the 80’s anymore, unlikely. An Irish Coffee?

“Ah, he’s saying, because we consume substances that have psychoactive effects, we’re drug addicts.”

No, I’d bet one of the first thing you and almost every other person in the developed world does the first thing in their morning is seek out the highest stimulation lowest effort thing they can. It’s so high in the threshold of reward and sensitisation that you don’t even realise how much you’ve numbed yourself to the simplest and most mundane actions required to function, because they’re just not interesting enough. I am old enough that I remember there was a retroactive disdain against the horror of a family TV Dinner, not a movie night, but where a family would consistently watch the television together while eating dinner. Maybe things are bad enough that they need that to not have a potentially divorce ending argument each night, but then there’s bigger problems. I’d bet it was the stimulation, the distraction, and no, not because the cooking was bad. Combining things has a bigger response. Drug addicts learn this very early on, and it’s very often why they die.

I’ve used the word stimulation here, when actually, an old comment about TV provides me with a very good segue into why stimulation might be the wrong word for what I’m trying to describe. “It’ll rot your brain.” People said about TV, books, video games, and mobile phones. And boy were they right. It might not be stimulating. But it sure as hell is not making you think, and that’s lowered the bar of averting cognitive atrophy to throwing a ball around a circle in a high care dementia ward. The problem isn’t really any one of these individual things, I’m not going full Uncle Ted here, the problem is that the pull of these became so strong, accessible, and consistent, that basically your brain is fried without them. It has no comprehension of how to eat a meal without watching a Youtube essay, and thus, has unlearned how to enjoy even badly cooked food. Maybe if you’re eating ramen for the 3rd time in the day you can put on some deep fried nonsense to distract yourself from thinking too hard about the nutritional information on the packet, but otherwise, you should try to be as present and grounded in the moment as physically possible. People can’t even seem to walk anywhere without looking at their phone. “They’re navigating.” Oh, all of them? The easy cop out is my parents used to drive us 4 hours to visit family with nothing but a book thick enough to contain about half the world’s information on hepatology and a far-too-short cassette containing a radio performance of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but their parents were labourers and basically could build anything, and their parents were probably blacksmiths and bakers, who knows at this point, either way the “young people can’t do what was learned in older eras” isn’t a particularly helpful or correct point, but it is a funny one, or at least it is to me.

Maybe you don’t have ADHD¹ and need prescription amphetamines. Maybe you aren’t addicted to caffeine. Maybe being stimulated makes everything just feel a little more baseline for you, because we live in a world where we’ve never been exposed to more information, including useless information, at once. And on one hand, our brain likes that a lot, you can tell that because again people will watch a 3 hour YouTube video on how a man named Henry McFry was secretly robbed out of owning all of the fastfood industry via corporate corruption, when the only people they will ever be able to use that information with is other clowns who watched that same video, people who are equally so conditioned for infinite stimulation and gratification that you could put the first sentence they spoke into an LLM and have a 1:1 accurate conversation with them without the real person’s involvement.

So here’s the thing. I don’t think anyone is really willingly going out of their way to engage with this, I think the vast majority of people are doing this because of the ego-obliterating weight of whatever happens after you stop doing these activities.

I think, basically, people are now incapable (not necessarily unwilling) to be whatever we might have previously considered to be described as bored. And it's completely understandable why, the world has infinite information shoved down your throat at all time more than any point in history, people telling you to care about asinine events across the world that will not affect you and you cannot change. And the result of that constant messaging, that these abstract, unactionable things are important, is simultaneously a message that YOU are not important, and that's why you feel okay just distracting yourself in this way, and being asleep, because you've been fed this entire time that you do not matter, because you literally cannot comprehend a scale of human activity that contains you. So you drink some coffee while you work on an excel sheet, and instead of it being something that you do to give you money, it gives you a little stimulation and money. It's not quite so bad now, is it?

So no, I don’t think you’re necessarily weak, and I’m not sure me paraphrasing something like the prayer of serenity to you is going to make you or anyone else magically reclaim their sense of scale by just remembering you exist. The infrastructure is literally at a global level, it is unavoidable. So, yes, you’re an addict, you’re bound to compulsions beyond your comprehension, and the existential weight of that is enough that it makes it really fucking hard to just be a person like your ancestors were.

I’m not saying don’t have a cup of coffee in the morning to get through your AGILE meeting. Believe me, if they were in person more commonly these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone brought a gun, that’d add some stimulation, that amount of terror would make you feel for certain that you exist, at least for a little while, maybe enough to quit your job and do what you’ve really wanted in life², to go and fall in love and start a family, to live in a way where you and everyone around you felt like they mattered and that they were important, loved, and existed. A life where everything is meaningful.

Or you could go back to your desk after they open up the office again in a week, and to distract yourself from the newly vacated cubicles beside you, you could open up my website. Or my Twitter. The choice is yours.

¹ Or autism. “Back on autism so soon?” I’m sorry, if you aren’t struggling to function in a supermarket, with blaring music, searingly bright lights, and thousands of brightly coloured, attention grabbing advertisements designed by teams of 7 digit salary professionals to make you look at them, I need to ask what dosage of gabapentin you’re on, or, double check if you’re Helen Keller. ↩

² Wait, isn't this literally the motivation of Jigsaw? Wait, apparently they already did a SAW style movie set in an office.³ ↩

³ Never mind. I watched it. It was just as terrible as any other SAW movie. ↩