Do I still post? No, I do not. A few ideas have come my way, urging for expression. For whatever reason, it happens most after a night out. The combination of alcohol, tobacco, nightlife, socialization, and sleep deprivation seems to inspire me. Yet I never produce anything. I procrastinate: a fancy name for escaping work.
“Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it.”
—Wilhelm Reich
The epidemic of the West is not pornography, video games, social media, video streaming, seed oils, political polarization, obesity, or neo-pronouns. They might be symptoms, but in my observations, the general root problem is an escalation in escapist behavior. We are unable to live life uninterruptedly, instead taking breaks from living. Please do not misunderstand: I am not talking about relaxation. Relaxation is a break from work and focused effort. Scrolling TikTok is not relaxing. You are confounding feeling relaxed with feeling nothing.
Moreover, these breaks are evidently getting longer, reaching the critical point where they are on par with the time spent actually being alive, whether working, having fun, or simply existing wholly. Perhaps we are past that point already.
Dopamine, Habits and Detoxes 🧠
Regardless, my observation that everyone is on their phone too much is not unique; it is the underlying or explicit theme in most of my posts, plus you probably come across a similar sentiment every day. The thought-provoking bit is asking why this is. If you were to ask, for example, Dr. Andrew Huberman, he could go into a very in-depth explanation of the neuro-chemistry behind dopamine and habit formation.
However, mechanistic explanations really answer “how” and over-intellectualize something under our noses: the quieter an activity is, the more we can hear the emotions demanding our attention. From an emotional point of view, a book is simply quieter, leaving more headroom to perceive your emotions, forcing us to deal with them. On the other hand, watching sitcoms while playing on your phone and vaping, while also high and eating junk, drowns any feeling that urges you to deal with uncomfortable internal and external realities.
Therefore, the why is in our irrational, emotional reaction. For my part, understanding the complex electro-chemistry going on in my brain or not makes little difference in my daily behavior. Thus, search the Internet all you want, but you are unlikely to find a better answer to why you procrastinate or cannot put your phone down than what comes up when you become more aware of your deeper emotions.
Who wants to (go to) sleep? 🥱
I was inspired to return to my Meme Analysis copycat roots when I came across this meme. Everybody wants to sleep, but nobody wants to go to sleep. In his book “Bioenergetics” Alexander Lowen, Ph.D. explains anxiety as the expansive impulses clashing against the armored defenses that contract the body. Letting go of this tight holding on of life impulses results in “falling anxiety,” which he found to become present, among other times, when neurotic individuals attempt to fall asleep:
“Underlying this problem is falling anxiety, the inability to go to bed early, and let oneself fall asleep easily. As a result, such people are tired in the morning and lack the energy to rise easily.” Bionergetics p.212
“I Never Sleep, Cause Sleep is The Cousin of Death” — Nas, N.Y. State of Mind
Sleep is indeed the cousin of death. Hypnos and Thanatos, the Greek gods of sleep and death, are in fact, twin brothers. In addition, Thanatos is what Freud named the death drive: impulses that are opposite to libido, to our life force. These are natural and inherent to our psyche, but we have created vehicles for Thanatos to unbalance the proper rhythms of expansion and contraction. Your unconscious wants you dead. Now the fastest way to achieve it is through the smartphone.
And yet, you have to stop engaging with Thanatos in order to fall into his cousin’s (or twin brother’s) arms. Going to sleep, concretely the time between finally putting your phone down to actually being asleep has become the most extensive break from taking breaks. This quiet time where you are still conscious makes room for Eros to fight back, for life is anything but an easy quitter: your emotions will be back with a vengeance. Often we find ourselves remembering embarrassing and uncomfortable memories right when we try to fall asleep; a common cause of insomnia. Perhaps the only moment of quiet in the entirety of your waking hours, you can no longer overload your awareness to distract yourself from your emotions. Finally, this is why you want to sleep but do not want to go to sleep.
Nevertheless, you should know your mind is not torturing you meaninglessly. You ought to feel, live, and process it all. It is only so overwhelming because you have created an unconscious habit of taking out your phone the second emotions arise. Otherwise, you would only deal with a smaller, more manageable dose of feelings at different times throughout your day as it comes up moment by moment. Instead, you choke the flow of energy (literally, your breathing becomes shallower when you are on your phone) until bedtime.
Likewise, boredom is only the first layer. I would describe it as a “dummy emotion” acting as a warning sign for the proper emotions that will start shifting inside you if you do not distract yourself soon. To be abundantly clear, prior to smartphones people did not sit through their boredom and discomfort like Zen masters. Yet the opportunity for boredom was much higher, and, excluding doing drugs, most activities mobilized their energy and were expressive. Even if only the more superficial layers of emotional depth became conscious, life was largely experienced instead of suspended and consumed. Furthermore, to make matters worse, in order to fall asleep, plenty of people increasingly cope with alcohol, marijuana, sleeping pills, or perhaps ASMR & RAIN
🌧 Perfect for Sleep | Soothing Whispers & Slow Triggers on a Rainy Night [Ear 2 Ear]
Continuous noise and numbness. God, anything but quiet.
Fear of Life 😰
I myself am scared of living fully, too. I am hunted by how much better my life would be if I harmonized myself through plenty of daily movement, meditation, journaling, a clean diet, sleeping early, and minimizing screen time. It is why I procrastinated on writing anything until I got called out for it. These essays break down underlying issues with aspects of modern life so, hopefully, both the reader and I can make positive changes. Make the unconscious conscious, as that famous Carl Jung quote reads. But if I still struggle to break plenty of bad habits, is it then meaningless? Would you attend an AA meeting if the host was hungover? I am stuck in a self-fulfilling catch-22, waiting for the clarity of mind to quit the bad habits that make me unable to have clarity of mind.
For instance, I frequently consume anti-internet content. The irony is great, like having said AA meeting over some beers at a bar. In a moment of self-awareness, you might wonder whether you are doing the same right now (which is fantastic to do.) But do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. While both Marvel and Lynch’s movies are movies, one moves me in a way the other does not even try to. While some mediums are inherently for mindless consumption, others possess a mass of heterogeneous quality. If we are talking text posts, hopefully my prose has more merit than the sextillion tweet or Reddit post exclaiming that TikTok has doomed humanity.
To conclude, I ask: why take breaks from living? Because we are all born victims. We are first victims of the most traumatic experience: birth. Thereafter we remain victims of the circumstances of said birth. But I wonder, when do we become masters of our destiny? Maybe when we finish puberty, get a job, or become of legal age to move out. Perhaps simply when we decide to. Yet what does that entail? Discipline, will, courage? It is my experience that the answer to these questions is of divine nature. The mere revelation that we can and ought to fulfill our potential is a spark of divinity that ignites the human spirit to achieve.
I believe that within everyone exists the possibility for ignition; that, eventually, something will light up, and we will have the choice to feed the fire or put it out. Having said that, my faith wavers. Distraction and lack of awareness cut us off from the divine. If you have been distracted every single minute since you left the birthing room, is there even the possibility to look deep enough within to find that drive in the first place? Courageous action, a clear purpose, and a strong will are rare, and only becoming rarer every second as humanity gets increasingly passive and our minds increasingly scattered.
But to answer your other question Travis: no. I do not have a Twitter. 🕊️
Your journal entry about heartbreak was monumental to me. I’ve made big leaps in my life since reading it, and often rereading it. Though, at the same time, I feel the air getting thicker, and I can feel my weight more strongly. Falling into worst habits. This was never going to be easy😅