Sideways 45

Sideways.  That’s how to crawl through a window.  That’s how I have to talk to my Grandma. That’s how you change hearts and minds.   Out the gate, I understand none of that makes any sense–Non Sequitur for the fancy among you.  But all of you should have learned, and I teach, that it is a cardinal sin of communication to engage an audience without context…

Well, I admit to my sin, with allowance for the fact that we live in an age where a person of decent sensibility can not distinguish reality from satire.  It is as if information has become like lunch meat…highly processed with plenty of artificial flavorings, and relatively tasty for various reasons, but you have absolutely no clue as to its origin.    

 Maybe that’s the natural consequence of burying our souls in our phones before we die…Maybe that makes our phones Horcruxes, Potter…maybe they’re Black Mirrors taking our reflections so when we’re dead our data-overlords can make nice holograms of us to entertain the guests at our funeral or for sporadic holiday remanifestations.

The future is made of maybe though, I reckon.  Reality waiting to be created through observation.  I’ll wager that we’ll be observing hotter temperatures then, but maybe I’m losing my mind.  A decade or so ago people used to tell me on Facebook that I was crazy for believing in climate change.  And I argued with them. We’ve come so far 🙂

That was early in my digital development…There are stages of that too, they just haven’t been named yet because Piaget is dead somebody said and we’re holding out for a hero.  Digital existentialism…It’s the new ontology, baby!! All those questions about being and time start to look a little differently through the lens of transhumanism as we begin the transition into an even more wired existence.  Yes, that has implications on who we are, our nature, our sense of identity and purpose, and most frightening of all, how we construct reality itself. Heck, I observe people on a daily basis who drive while looking at their phones, as if that’s a skill.  Have they lost their minds? What an objective reality we live in where subjectively the laws of physics and social contract can simultaneously be short-circuited in favor of a quick dopamine release…

But think about it… the potentiality of such an event. You know, of losing your mind.  And I don’t mean you’ve gone “crazy.” I mean your dopamine receptors for years have been saturating your brain with joy and euphoria whenever you get a “like”, and you can’t ever really pull away.  Kind of like an addiction to nicotine. Real talk, that’s addictive…Is there a patch to help people put down their Facebooks?? If so, I’m donating to the cause because some folks are literally writing themselves out of the Book of Life feeding Zuckerberg’s insatiable thirst for more and more and more data….We’re crazy to keep giving it to him, but I’m losing my mind trying to find a way to sublimate…In the Age of the Troll, I need something more fulfilling to process the absurdity…something healthy that belongs to me, and I don’t have to worry about some innocuous musing costing me a friendship, or more pragmatically, any emotional capital.   

I mean, I watched the Matrix, I read Descartes.  Reality itself is probably some sort of construct, broadcast to us from some source beyond us, thus making us mere biological antennas receiving our spiritual frequency from some deified ultimate reality of grand unified theories. 

Blah blah blah…It’s all noise, unredacted noise in the signal.  Like a really scratched record playing at the core of our existence…Arthritis in the very bones of our soul.  And there is lots of noise these days…And like spring flowers kissed by the morning sunshine, we irradiate ourselves in the cacophony of information, forcing even the higher order areas of our brain to process in ways we did not evolve to do so.  Think about it…Modern humans are biologically the same as we were 100,000 years ago (or so) when Homo Sapiens first differentiated themselves from the proverbial missing link(s). But we’ve had the honor of witnessing continuous progression of infinitely more advanced means of transferring information–the evolution of information transfer…Which is exactly what a meme is.  
The issue becomes with the amount of information the modern brain processes relative to what it evolved to process.  That discrepancy, in spite of being a natural consequence of the modern world, has not run its course yet from an evolutionary perspective.  We don’t yet have any data to indicate the effects of a life-time of digitized, connected existence. We won’t have that data until we’re dead unfortunately, as even my Zennial generation only started being wired in our early 20s.  What about my kids’ brains? When they’re finally old enough to have dementia, will they start seeing the world as a large game of Fortnite?? Mario Kart??

Social media makes it worse…Facebook, for all of us, has in many respects come to resemble a swamp that became an abyss…Twitter has been a weaponized amplifier of our basest humanity.  There is great irony in the fact that the digital spaces that connect more humans than at any point in history are themselves leaving us more disconnected and empty than ever before. Vacuous.  For real…Well, scroll through Twitter and see if you feel uplifted, see if it gives you a rejuvenated sense of optimism and empathy. In fact, the lizard will give your brain a nice shot of cortisol to help you calm down and cope.  Hmmm…Cortisol. Nothing like being saturated with a stress hormone to make it through….life??

You can’t Facebook your way to fulfillment, and certainly not happiness.  But that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of trying. We all know these people…by blood or nostalgia we cling to them, keeping them as “friends” as if miraculously one day my Uncle will stop posting political talking point memes that must have been designed to influence 3rd graders by self-effusive, smarmy partisans, or even worse an incel troll attempting to counter-balance existential impotence by appealing to the faculties of those who actually look at such memes as arbiters of truth and reality…Or even worse by a military trained troll working under the auspices of a foreign power to destroy the neo-liberal order…AAAAHHHH!!!

That’s a problem folks, especially when it seems there are tooooo many people on your friend’s list who can’t see farther than their own tongues, nor think deeper than their own feet.  It makes us vulnerable, individually and collectively.

And that’s why I’m starting this blog.  My emotional capital is too valuable to spend it trying to fight the tide of constant cognitive dissonance on social media.  That would be like trying to fight the tides of the sea by wading in and standing your ground…A fool’s errand, at best.

I’ve decided folks simply can’t handle frontality in communication, especially when there’s a disagreement.  We’ve become limbic lizards, dense and defensive–a bunch of cold-blooded cogitators with a slowed mental metabolism.  Thus, to truly plant ideas and change minds, my tact will henceforth be to come in Sideways…Not from the vacuum of the periphery where a lot of folks have taken up philosophical residence, but from an unexpected angle, from an unexpected connection.  Subtle, so as to trick the lizard into hibernating and the defense mechanisms aren’t activated; maybe then real thinking and change can occur.

Yeah, that might seem like a noble pursuit, or even a pretentious one, but that’s ok…I’m doing this for my own therapy, and if my musings can help someone process the Age of 45 then I can live with that, as I haven’t spent any emotional capital nor have I contributed to Zuckerberg’s data coffers.