Swipe, Click; Lock and Load.
Or, The Opposite of Solitude; at some point we need to get away from it all.
In this era of being connected, woke, and up to date with the latest of everything — news, fashion, happenings, social media posts/feeds, etc., it is easy to see why we are making ourselves crazy.
Having to be “on” all the time requires a lot of physical energy and mental resources. Our brains are so revved up all the time that we can’t shut them off; even when we should be sleeping; the result is we suffer from a pandemic of insomnia.
When do we ever experience real solitude? Alone, driving in the car? No. Traveling, lying on the beach somewhere? Perhaps, though traveling requires a lot of coordination and you are in unfamiliar settings.
I’m not talking about going to far-away places or remote locations. I mean the sort of solitude that is as much an attitude, a place within, that can be accessed anywhere you are. Think tranquility.
A hike in the woods? Meditating? Yeah, now you are talking, but it’s really a small percentage of the population on a societal level that actually engages in those activities in an effective way. Need I say, there is plenty of evidence that our mongrel society is far from being serene, and at peace.
We are so tied to our phones — our hand held computer/communication devices that provide a minute-by-minute input of fresh stimulation, (e.g., news, content, social media posts). God forbid you should get a call from a friend or employer saying, “did you see what so-n-so, said?” and you don’t know what so-n-so said.
We are stuck to it like the “tar baby” that you just can’t get away from, and you continue to get more and more stuck, the more you dive in. The phone in our hand has become the “monkey on our backs.”
The other analogy that may help illustrate the point is B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning of pigeons, and Pavlov’s conditioned response experiments before him. We think of the feedback we get from our phones as “positive reinforcement” but at certain levels, it progresses to other levels of operant conditioning: “Negative Reinforcement” and “Negative Punishment.”
In some experiments rats were conditioned to press a lever to get a food pellet and they reinforced this conditioning over some period of time. Then the investigator programed the bar-pressing to be inconsistent, to where the rat may have to press the lever several times to get a reward, and once that behavior was entrained, the investigator introduced an occasional electric shock coupled with a reward when the lever was pressed; just noxious enough to alarm the rat. Eventually the regimen was advanced so that there were occasional shocks without rewards.
Because the lever-pressing behavior continued to produce an occasional rewards the rat took its chances and pressed the lever again and again, relieved to get the reward without a shock, but increasingly weary, as the intervals of shock vs. reward became more erratic and unpredictable. The stress produced in these animals caused them become neurotic and aggressive. They suffered from ulcers and hair loss; eventually their health deteriorated, and they stopped eating.
We should view tapping, clicking, and swiping as analogous to the rat pressing the lever. We tap and swipe to get the next little dopamine pellet, and our appetite for that stimulus continues to grow until these behaviors take up increasing amounts of our time, as we crave more stimulus. Not unlike the drug abuser rushing to get the next fix.
Now imagine a young person just developing their personality getting caught up in the stimulus reward of tapping and swiping.
This tapping/reward behavior shortens our attention span, since we know that the faster we swipe the sooner we will get to the next screen/input, and get the reward that input gives, in terms of the dopamine squirt.
Add to that, the effect of the light from the screen stimulating our optic nerves. You can do this experiment yourselves. To test this, go to bed on “night one” and read an article or just flip through on your phone with the screen brightness at a normal level and see how long it takes for you to go to sleep.
On the second night go to bed in the same position with the room lit with just a bedside light, adequate for reading a physical book and begin reading the pages, and note the time it takes to get to sleep. Personally, the lighted screen can keep me awake all night, but even just a few pages of written word on some nights, can put me to sleep.
These devices are the vector for the constant stimulation that we have become addicted to, much like the syringe that injects the drugs that get the user off again. The phone doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s how we use it to feed our increasing cravings for more and more input.
It used to be that you could go to your neighborhood dive bar and sit and chat with the bartender or other patrons, but now what you see is most guys sitting at the bar hunched over their phones, only looking up to get another round.
Taking a drive in the country with beautiful scenery all around and the kids are looking at their phones — the wife too.
Am I saying that phones or social media are bad? Certainly not, but I like chocolate too, and yet I don’t keep it around the house because I can’t stop eating it. Having said that I’m not very good at putting my phone in a drawer and ignoring it even for a couple of hours. (What if someone texts me?!? It could be one of my daughters, and they need me!!)
What to do about it? Not sure it can be done at a societal level, since there are first amendment issues and personal freedoms involved, but there needs to be some sort of mechanism for discipline with regards to how “tuned in” we are. Maybe it can only be done at the individual level. So I’m doing what I can to increase the visibility to expand awareness of the issue, to make more people aware.
Entanglements like our social media connections, trap our mental and emotional being in ways that may seem rather illogical; illogical maybe, but very real. We have to know immediately if someone is casting aspersions on us in social media so we can jump on it right away.
For the older generation that didn’t grow up with social media it is sometimes difficult to understand how young people, with their whole lives ahead of them, can be so devastated by cyber-bullies, that they take their own lives. “It’s just words on a computer screen — just turn it off and go outside and play, — enjoy your life.”
If you think that, you are going to just have to step aside and recognize that these kids today live in a different world than the one you grew up in. In their world the cyber entanglements are very concrete, and are a force to be reckoned with.
This may seem off point, but it all points to the opposite of solitude. Solitude being defined as more than just being alone, but being alone and at peace. Alone and okay.
It is harder than meditating. For those who are able to shut out the world and meditate and contemplate their navel, it is an active process, removing one’s selves from the world around them. It is isolated.
The solitude we need is more akin to a baseline comfort level; comfort in one’s own skin. You don’t have to be sitting in a lotus position; staring into the sunset, or listening to sound healing, or white noise. Just you, being with you.
Being an empathetic recluse I often observe other people who are not comfortable with themselves, and so I point out these issues in this article, so that others (you know who you are) will be aware of these things, and can start to whittle away at the structures you may have built over a lifetime — that you feel like you can’t live without. Some of those structures you have built to protect yourself from others, or harm, or hurt. And others may be behaviors you have incorporated into your personality, that you feel somehow improves you, or makes you popular/more attractive.
Solitude is the only way to get to know yourself. You can attend self-help seminars or retreats, whatever, and to the extent they can help you gain perspective, that’s great, but you still have to go home and be with yourself. Figure out what makes sense for you, as opposed to having someone (or social media) dictate what you ought to think and feel.
I have always said there is no such thing as good advice. That may sound harsh, but all too often people giving advice think that you should follow their sage advice, and if you don’t you are a fool.
Advice can be good if it is offered (upon request) as an insight into something the adviser may have some experience in, that is offered for you to benefit from, but more often it comes from individuals who think they know better and are schooling you, because you don’t know what to do for yourself. That’s especially true with unsolicited advice.
Think of it as though there is a person inside of you, who is you. The “physical you,” your persona, may need to safeguard the inner you; to act as the interface and filter with the outer world, but you should do everything you can to resolve any conflict between the perceptions of others and the inner you.
Be good to yourself.
