Vishuddha
Seeking connection, truth, and worth in the attention economy
A stubborn frog has taken up residence in my throat. It resists eviction no matter how vigorously I rattle the walls of my larynx. I’ve been walking around the house clearing my throat over and over for weeks, annoying myself, surely annoying my husband. He tells me he can hear me, reliable as a metronome, through the walls of the room in our house where he meditates. (I credit his meditation practice with the uncritical tone with which he reports this.)
The other day, I stopped in a shop with a display of aromatherapy blends supposedly formulated to support each of the chakras. Looking at the blue orb that represented the throat chakra hovering over the illustrated human’s neck on the display graphic, it occurred to me that this throat frog might be metaphysical in nature. I read the brief description of the fifth chakra, also known as Vishuddha, on the display: “The throat chakra is the center of creativity, self-expression and communication, according to Ayurveda, the ancient healing art of India.”
It’s true, I thought. My creativity and self-expression have been stymied lately. As a writer and actor, my work has to run a gauntlet of gatekeepers, and my stamina is waning. Rejections from editors and auditors; others’ judgments, real and perceived; the constant din of people angling for attention online; a cultural toxicity that seems to have seeped into the fabric of how people communicate: It’s all come together to form a dark swarm of bees that I’ve inhaled. Now they’re lodged in my throat, muting me from the inside. I feel myself banging around in there, but the channels that let the world in and me out are clogged and sluggish. I keep on clearing my throat, but it’s not getting clearer.
In 2003, I graduated from college and joined the Peace Corps. Stationed in Burkina Faso at 22, lonely, lost, and acutely aware of how miserably I was failing at being of any real service, I spent my days writing. I wrote countless letters to my loved ones back home and waited for their replies as if for water. When I found my way to the internet café in a nearby town a couple times a month, I’d tap out missives, scenes from my days, and send them as mass emails to a select group of friends and family.
The efficiency of connecting with multiple people at once was worth sacrificing the intimacy and specificity of addressing one person at a time. It’s true that a single message shared with my mom, two ex-boyfriends, my childhood best friend, and my high school English teacher required a certain generality of tone. Still, I knew who I was talking to. I could fit them all in my mind at one time. And I wanted them to talk back to me. I wanted connection — the completion of a communication circuit, a call and response, a sense of being heard and a desire to listen in return.
Those mass emails were my first step toward a more general sense of audience, a movement away from one-on-one conversations, instead climbing onto a pedestal to address a crowd — though it was still a crowd made up of particular faces I could see and name.
Then came my first blog in 2005 where I wrote about the struggles of a 24-year-old wannabe actor and writer with a crappy customer service day job. It was a bigger platform from which the faces in the crowd looked fuzzier and more anonymous, where I got the first inkling that one no longer got to anoint one’s audience, choose them carefully, have a specific reason to say a specific thing to a specific person. Now one had to attract readers, be interesting or useful or insightful or funny enough to draw a crowd. Followers we call them now — as if we’re all gurus, leaders of our own cults, mediums endlessly generating messages (or, god help us all, “content”) to keep the faceless horde looking in our direction.
The progression from direct communication to image crafting felt inexorable as it was happening, but it brought increasing cognitive dissonance at each step. Who am I talking to and why? This question haunted the periphery of my effort at building a public persona, which seemed to take on a momentum of its own, carried on the current of the culture around me.
Today, communication feels less and less about connection and more about accumulation. You can buy fake likes from fake bots, and people do. Inflating crowd size didn’t start with the current occupant of the Oval Office — he just took the digital trend to its analog conclusion.
In the “attention economy,” staying in the spotlight feels urgent to the point that we create our own, beam them at ourselves in the form of camera phones — become our own paparazzi stalking ourselves, manufacturing our own celebrity. Attention is currency, energy, reward, worth whatever it takes to get it. Opting out no longer feels like an option. Our social capital translates directly to monetary capital — to survival — especially for artists, for whom follower counts dictate everything from casting to book deals.
It’s as if we’ve all agreed to enter Plato’s Cave and turn our full attention to the shadows we project . Sure, you can always leave the cave, live in the solid world of things, but the cost, we fear, would be wandering the wilderness all alone.

Our bodies are teeming with signaling molecules: gasses, proteins, hormones, and neurotransmitters zipping around our synapses, diffusing across our plasma membranes. We think of ourselves as discrete, complete beings with thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that correlate logically and objectively to the outside world. “I feel sad,” one might say. Or: “I’m thirsty,” or, “I love you.”
But is there an “I”?
“I” am a series of processes, a constant and tireless conversation among cells and organs and microbes. “I” am just a phone tree of critters within a critter. I’m a commune, a confabulation. The love “I” feel was conjured by committee, my shape-shifting cloud of chatty atoms agreeing by consensus to lean toward yours.
When you and I talk, we are two raucous conversations conversing.

This morning I read an article in The Atlantic about kids Googling themselves for the first time and finding that substantial information about their lives was easily found online: pictures, school papers, swim meet scores, embarrassing anecdotes their parents had deemed fit to share publicly.
Some of the kids reacted with horror, reprimanding their parents for broadcasting so many digital privacy invasions without their knowledge or consent. Others reacted with glee. They felt famous, and a thrilling sense of the wooden puppet becoming a real boy. As if a digital data trail confers a magical authenticity lacking in analog life; as if a person isn’t real until they exist online. “I don’t want to live in a hole and have only two pics of me online,” one 13-year-old girl is quoted as saying. “I want to be a person who is a person. I want people to know who I am.”
I want to be a person who is a person. I want people to know who I am. These unabashed words keep echoing in my mind, making me cringe: Here is my id personified, externalized, given voice, making me ashamed of the slick and shallow emptiness of my own secret desire.
There’s a river in the sky above the Amazon rainforest, mirroring the Amazon River on the ground. Water sucked up through the trees in the rainforest collects as mist when it evaporates into the air, then forms a mighty stream that flows through the ether above the Amazon River below. The trees span the space in between.
Our digital life feels like the river in the sky, mirroring the river of physical life here on Earth. Our attention is split between the two; we toggle back and forth between them.
In the real world, we have to interact with other people to feel psychologically healthy — that’s why solitary confinement is torture. Increasingly it feels that our digital avatars also have to interact in order to feel solid. We have to continuously provide them with the input of engagement with other avatars to keep them healthy and thriving. And the more time and energy we spend inhabiting the avatar world, the less we have available to commit to the analog one. The more robust and actualized our mirror selves become, the more emaciated and disconnected our real selves and communities grow.
We’re climbing into the river in the sky, and it is sweeping us away.

In my quest to coax my throat chakra back to health, my first stop (naturally) was the internet, where I learned that the fifth chakra is as much about listening as it is about expression. It’s about voicing and absorbing authenticity and truth — expressing one’s own perspective while fully apprehending others’.
This does not bode well for America’s throat chakra.
It’s no secret that we’re more divided now than at almost any other point in our nation’s history. A 2018 poll revealed that fifteen percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats agree that the country would be better off if large numbers of members of the opposing party “just died.”
Our bubbles are so well-insulated that whatever messages do manage to escape them hit the ears of those on the other side distorted and dissonant. We invent each other, imagine each other, create straw men to immolate. We avoid actually hearing each other at all costs. The very idea that we should try to listen to each other has become offensive in some circles. And all the mechanisms that were supposedly geared toward helping us connect have turned out to exacerbate our worst impulses. We log on and it’s like merging into rush hour traffic. Everyone else’s humanity is disguised behind metal bubbles or 2D screens. It’s one big Darwinian competition for advantage, momentum, status, and dominance.
All our communication is scored with metrics. The scoreboard is right there, points measured in likes and follower counts. We know instantly who’s winning and who’s losing. But pan out far enough and it becomes clear: all this traffic is fomenting human misery on a vast scale. And those left behind are dying of despair.
How can we crawl out of our cars, crawl out from behind our screens, and see each other?
I’m reading about Buddhism. The idea of karma is an intellectual knot that I’m circling and tugging on, trying to find a way to understand. One of the big revelations for me so far is that karma has more to do with our intentions than our actions. The suffering or satisfaction that ensues from our own behavior has less to do with its direct consequences in the world than with the motivations that underlie it, and the way those motivations affect our own internal ecosystem.
It’s not necessarily that I’ll be punished by the world if I lie. It’s that my own awareness of the gulf between the truth and what I say will cause dissonance and discomfort and make me suffer.
Social media use is correlated with greater unhappiness, but no one has ever put their finger on precisely why. Maybe karma is a clue — all these thinly cloaked, unhealthy intentions (to inspire jealousy, attract attention, craft a persona, score points) being stoked and encouraged, deemed essential to modern life, running around disguised as innocuous Instagram posts and Facebook status updates.
Insecurity masquerading as gratitude or exuberance creates a sort of disorienting hall of mirrors where we’re all gaslighting ourselves and each other, denying the truth about what it is we really want: attention, admiration, others’ eyes, others’ envy.
Maybe the more dishonest we are with ourselves about our intentions, the less opportunity we have to transform them into something that causes less suffering. Something like an earnest desire to connect or comfort. Or understand. Or share. Or love.
I ended up buying that throat chakra spray. Every day I spray it on my throat and then sit in silent meditation for half an hour, watching my mind, letting it speak its piece until it starts to hush. I’ve stopped having to clear my throat so much.
Sometimes when I sit there’s a quiet, internal voice that starts to come clear. It whispers insights, instructions, tiny and profound revelations. The thing I hear it say most often is: Tell the truth.
But the truth moves slowly. It’s taken me more than a month to write this essay, to work out what I think, what I want to say. Over the course of that month, Minneapolis became one of the first places in the world to get a 5G wireless network, on which data travels four to 10 times faster than on 4G.
It’s as if some invisible force has laid a brick on the gas pedal, and we’re all trapped in the backseat, gaining speed on a road not of our choosing, trying to distract ourselves from our rising panic with videos and gifs and memes.
And there’s the truth zipping by outside the window, sitting perfectly still.

In 1974, humans sent the Arecibo message into outer space — an interstellar greeting from us to any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it. Among the information the message contained was: the numbers one through 10, the atomic numbers of the elements that make up DNA, a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA, a graphic figure of a human, and the human population of the Earth.
The message was aimed at the core of global star cluster M13, which it will take 25,000 years to reach. Any response would take an additional 25,000 years to reach us.
But according to Donald Campbell, a Cornell University professor of astronomy who was a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory at the time the message was sent, the real purpose of the message was never to achieve contact. “It was a strictly symbolic event, to show that we can do it,” he said, explaining that sending the message was meant to highlight the power of the new radar transmitter at Arecibo.
Even our attempts at interstellar communication are insincere, it seems — a show performed mostly for the benefit of those who might be watching. Or maybe those astronomers were abundantly clear all along that humanity was their true audience, and their expression was perfectly aligned with their honest intention: to give us the opportunity to feel connected and represented, to see ourselves distilled to a few fundamental truths hurtling through the vast emptiness of space.
We have about 49,955 years left to wait for a response, if one is coming. That should give us plenty of time to work out what we want to say next, how to tell the truth about who we are and what we’ve become.
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