I'd like to think that the deepest parts of my soul have been touched more by conversations and books than by comment sections and memes. But at this point, who knows?
I should know better. Shouldn't I? Why do I keep consuming that same intoxicating mix of rage bait chased by reaction commentary? When I come to, my cortisol is spiked, I feel like shit, and I can't entirely account for the last few hours. God, I really need to quit. I swear, that's the last time. I will never scroll again...
I have to be careful around YouTube. It's a mixed bag; there's some valuable and wholesome stuff sprinkled in with the poison. And just now it occurs to me that how it's cut has been algorithmically optimized for me. It's precisely at the edge of my tolerance and always will be.
At this point, when I go to Reddit I'm planning to have a bad time. And I don't even dare to fuck with X. Elon Musk allegedly does a lot of drugs, but that's got to be the worst one for him by far.
So, it's time to walk away from all of that. My wakeup call was getting shingles earlier this year triggered by stress and terrible sleep. I'm 37 years old. I could have lost vision in my right eye, the way it was spreading. Christ.
I'm giving more space in my head to books now. My ebook reader is where my phone used to be on the bedside table. I'm communicating with people who died long ago, people who can't give their take on the outrageous thing that happened this news cycle. And yet they often seem to have the exact words for our current situation.
This summer I reread Walden, a book I credit for helping me find out what I wanted out of life when I was in my early 20s. I can't describe in one post the total effect it had on me as I read it again. But I do want to share two passages here.
The first one I want to share just because of its uncanny coincidence with my recent crisis:
Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. ... After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,”—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
But the quote that prompted my rambling here today is actually from a chapter called "Reading." Thoreau has just made the claim that "in dealing with truth we are immortal," and he then illustrates it in an astonishing way:
The oldest Egyptian or Hindu philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.
Heathens possessing divine revelation? Primitive cultures tutoring the scientific age? If Thoreau's conservative townsmen could make it past these radical suggestions, they'd still have to grapple with the main idea. We are timelessly united in our apprehension of eternal truths. Our subjectivity seems to melt away in the encounter. We are carried away from ourselves, we lose ourselves, we commune with one another in an ecstatic, psychedelic moment of eureka. And we can live forever in that moment, connecting with every consciousness that finds its way there.
Is that really too much to ask from our social media platforms?
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