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The great diversion, or the spiritual consequences of living in superficial reality

-- By MarinaFratt - 20 Oct 2023

The Symptom is Misery

Youths these days are no stranger to misery. I don’t know much about statistics but they seem to largely corroborate this point. As someone who was recently a youth myself, the answer to why the youth is miserable seems obvious. Present day youth is lived out under a set of highly observed, superficial conditions.

There are the superficial systems of observation in and around school, including the constant standardized testing and the grades sent regularly into parent’s inboxes. But then there is the rest of life, which increasingly dwells in superficial and observed online spaces. I think the misery comes when youth, sensitive, curious and hungry for approval get caught in the absurdity of these superficial systems that reward the extreme, the dubious and the non-sensical. This poses in each young person a series of dilemmas, such as what type of isolation do you choose? The isolation of being out of touch with your peers or the isolation of addiction to the endless scroll?

Regardless of how a person approaches the dilemmas, the absurdity of it all is grating. Even if one forgoes many of the conventional social uses of media, the gravitational pull of living online comes in many forms and most engage in some way. Between video games, streaming music constantly, engaging in cultural anthropology on reddit, the options for immersion are endless. And the lifelessness of the larger systems all but necessitate distraction from them. After a short lifetime of distraction, there is a restlessness. There is no framework for contemplation or serious questions. There is a trap, a deep and near-unscalable valley in between the mountains of productivity and leisure.

So how does consciousness go from unexamined to contemplated? How does one in the valley find the discipline to confront the question? Might the question be as important as life and death and meaning itself?

Might the Antidote be Silence?

I was recently in a crowded church when a priest asked how many people fell asleep to silence and a minuscule fraction of the crowd raised their hands. In an overflowing church in Soho, we sat and kneeled for several periods of total quiet, 20 minutes at a time. The silence was dense, given how many of us were keeping it. This hush in the midst of the evening rush felt like wisdom. Is it silly to say that these sets of unpunctuated minutes felt revolutionary?

I sense a connection between this nurturing of silence there and the compelling pleas from Professor Moglen in class to cease use of predatory technology, particularly with respect to the degradation of our attention. From the source of the societal, technological, economic, security, and psychological concerns that Moglen elaborates upon, here bubbles up another dimension that affects us on the inside, our mood, our gratitude, our inner dialogue. Which leads me to ask, what are the spiritual consequences of living in the digital non-reality?

In a recent interview, Bob Dylan said of music listeners in the present era, “we’re pill poppers, cube heads and day trippers,” and that streaming has made music “too smooth and painless.” The quiet that naturally falls upon the world in the morning has been diverted. There has been a bait and switch from the unobscured human experience to life through the digital lens, but how dangerous is it? How deep is the replacement of the natural with the superficial? Is streaming music really such a problem? Can moderation be a solution? So what if it’s the real world or sounds bytes or pixels on a screen? Is it all really as bad as pornography?

The reality is we have lost touch with the simplicity available to humans. We can hardly dare to imagine or experiment with unentangling ourselves from our favorite (or most addictive) uses of our beloved tech. Maybe the solution is as analogue as life used to be.

I’ve thought that without silence, the interior life suffocates. Without knowing our own voice, how can we expect to produce calm and tranquil thought? Ultimately the great diversion created by the technology enveloping the lives of so many creates a moral question. One worth examining. Might the only state in which to ask the question, and perhaps the answer of the question, be silence?

Why does the person on the soap box second guess herself?

In truth, I have been diverted from writing this essay dozens of times, from reading a comment on my tweet, to responding to texts from my great aunt, to losing an eBay bidding war, my attention has been punctuated, even more than this sentence is with commas. But not all of these diversions I regret. I think I learned a bit about human psychology and how markets work when I lost the war for an antique set of candlesticks by a dollar. I’m excited to receive the book the person in my twitter comments is mailing me. I love that my Instagram comment section is a small family reunion when we live all live in different corners of the country.

Despite the facts, I remain in a state of dilemma. To what extent are we working in absolutes?

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