Distractions

Feb 1, 2015 //
0

We live in a culture of distractions. We watch TV and movies, or browse the innumerable Buzzfeed, 9gag, or Reddit pages, or become sucked into a spiral of Youtube videos, or spend endless hours plugged into our phones even when in the company of friends and family, or play video games of all genres and platforms.

What qualifies these as distractions, rather than play? They are all passive consumption, whereas play is an inherently creative act. It is the difference between playing a sport, or watching it on TV. Of telling a story, or having one told at you. At least books require the creative power of imagination, compared to a television show where the mental faculties required are less than when we are sleeping. Some might argue that video games, since they require input from the player, might escape the definition of a distraction, but actions in a video game cannot evade the programmable components of its software. All the possible outcomes of the game have already been foretold, and it is simply a matter of finding and consuming them.

Think of when you were a child, playing with your friends and siblings. You would create ideas, stories, and whole worlds with something as simple as a cardboard box. Sports and board games frequently had completely made-up rules that were only understood by those playing them. There was a shared intimacy, a bond, created in this play that adults in their more nostalgic moments despondently recall as having lost forever.

Think of your friendships and relationships now. How often does your “play” with friends require passive consumption? Do you go out to consume food? Or drinks? Or a movie? Maybe you play video games. Even playing in organized sports is more about conforming to rules and authority, than it is about engaging in a creative output. Do you feel as though you are not as close with your adult friends as you were with your childhood ones?

Distractions are a narcotic. They are an escape from the world we live in. They offer stimulus without effort. And, like a narcotic, we are developing a tolerance for them. Our movies are a prime example of this: movies today have faster cuts, more special effects, more explosions, more Michael Bay. Movies of the past are frequently referred to as “boring” because of this developed tolerance. Boredom is a withdrawal symptom of the lack of stimuli that our body now craves.

Busyness has become a virtue. Filling our time with something, anything, is a commendable feature of contemporary culture because it means that there is no time for that person to get bored. To stop and appreciate life, to clear one’s head in meditation, to slow down; these are all boons to both health and stability. But too often they are dismissed as “boring”, and people are frequently unable to participate in these slower activities, despite even an active attempt to try them.

The peril of distractions comes not just from their narcotic effects on our minds, but in the literal sense of “distraction” as well. If we are pacified and preoccupied, we are not paying attention to the world around us. This allows unchecked oppression, war, and other such human rights violations to occur while most of the developed world focuses more on celebrity gossip than the strife that surrounds them. The promise of the internet was a worldwide voice, access to infinite knowledge, and with that knowledge and voice would come revolution against oppression and hate, and equality for all. But if you ask anybody today what they use the internet for, typically the answer will be pornography, epic fail videos, or sports statistics.

We also tend to miss out on life; we miss out on the connection with our loved ones, if we are too busy with our distractions. If the time we spent on Facebook was spent with friends, or the time watching cat videos was spent adopting and playing with our own, or if we tried new and exciting activities rather than watching the epic fails of others, the enrichment in our lives would be exponentially higher.

Further tragic correlation with the proliferation of distractions is the jingoism that seems to almost be an inherent aspect of them. Sports fans will become physically violent with other fans, despite no real connection to anybody on “their” teams. People will get up in arms over their choice of computing or gaming platform. People will even define their lives by the television, or other mass media productions, they consume. Any perusal of an online dating website will reveal the dependence on the series Game of Thrones for a person’s sense of identity.

Do these distractions merit the emphasis and importance that we place upon them? Probably not, since they have absolutely no relevance to life, and any meaning we place on them would be purely without basis.

It is true that listening to someone else’s music or stories can affect us emotionally or stimulate us intellectually. Even regular drugs can induce creativity or offer new ways of appreciating the world. But to rely on them, to make them the foundation of our lives, that is the life of an addict.

We do need to escape sometimes. I myself enjoy movies and television, and when I go out with friends, it’s usually for a beer or a meal. The way life is set up almost requires escape; distractions are a necessary coping mechanism to deal with our day to day working lives. But what does that say about the system of our culture if it saps the life and creativity out of us, requiring us to run away with our distractions just to survive?

Post-script: Creating a story or a song requires a passive receptor of that story or song, it’s true. But often the missing component is intimacy and connection in that process. For example, being able to look and experience, or even interact with the person delivering the creative output is far more valuable than seeing them on a screen. Even with this blog, I find it much more rewarding when someone comments or brings it up with me in person, and I’m sure the reading experience is more rewarding as well if there is a connection with me as an author.

Also, for an even more critical look at distractions, specifically sports, listen to Noam Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA5jOdPiZWI

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Categories Uncategorized

The End of the World

Jan 24, 2015 //
6

I don’t mean the end of the world as in a form of an environmental or man-made Armageddon, either through global warming eliminating the human race, or an asteroid obliterating the planet, or a series of massive volcanic eruptions making Earth unlivable. I mean the final stage of our planet, as in our sun dying, rendering any kind of life on Earth impossible. Or incinerating the planet, I can’t remember which is the case, but the idea is the same.

There are two scenarios that can come to pass if humanity has miraculously managed to last that long: either we have developed scientifically to the point that we are spread out among the stars and mankind survives, or we have not, and we die with our planet. There isn’t really a third option.

The majority of people look at this as the obvious need for scientific progress, as they believe that the continuation of our species is the preferred option. Humans as individuals cannot live forever, but we can, as a species, expand for an eternity if we make science and reason the focal point of our development. Human beings have achieved great things in the past, and it is not unlikely that we could continue to achieve them into the future if we maintain our path of rational enlightenment.

Let’s look at some of the progress we’ve already achieved. Has any of it come about without some atrocity or another? The achievements of the past, like the pyramids, the cathedrals of Europe, the Taj Mahal: these wonders of engineering that tourists of today clamor around in order to take kitschy photographs of themselves next to were all built by slaves. If you throw enough human suffering and death at something, you can create anything. These things we look at as great achievements are often created for the most superficial of reasons. The pyramids are the self-aggrandizing tombs of the rulers of the land who considered themselves gods, and felt they deserved to be treated as such in death. The Taj Mahal is a tomb for the Shah’s favourite wife. The cathedrals are testaments, not to the glory of God, but to the glory of His representatives on Earth. All these achievements, from all that suffering, for vanity.

But what about the scientific progress that leads to the improvement of society? The industrial revolution and the advent of the machine promised to reduce our workload to almost nothing, increasing both the leisure and overall health and happiness of humans across the globe. In reality, however, the industrial revolution lead to inhumane working conditions, class stratification, and the destruction of the environment.

Even today, our computing systems would be impossible without the continuation of the horrific working conditions now hidden from view in third world countries, and the polluting effects of mining the necessary toxic heavy metals, and the waste that comes with the inevitable obseletion of the electronic device, and its subsequent trip to the landfill.

If this trend continues, and we are lucky enough to survive and surpass the destruction of the earth, we would be barbaric conquerors of the universe. Pillaging each planet we came across, either oblivious or apathetic to the carnage that would follow in our wake. And for what? To what purpose do we continue to progress towards infinite expansion across the stars? Do we simply desire immortality? Are we really only Pharaohs, wishing to be gods, uncaring about the suffering it requires to get us there? Do we want to live forever simply out of vanity? What meaning is there to immortality?

Look at the life of an individual. Do we want to be the person who, in their ambition, crushes those on his way to the top, who cares not for the world around him as he blindly revels in his wealth, his achievements? What are the regrets most people have on their death bed? An article from the Huffington Post lists the top five, and the running theme is wishing that there had been more time for a truer connection with oneself and with others. The meaning of life is revealed by those who are about to lose it, and the life lived with meaning, with connection, is the one worth living, not the one dedicated to progress or ambition.

As a species, who do we want to be? Which is the preferred end of the world scenario? Do we want to be the heartless conquerors, who subjugate the universe with the hubris of our imagined divinity, or do we want to be the species that dies with our planet, content that we lived with meaning, and have accepted our fate as mortals? I would rather die with a smile on my face, knowing I had lived and loved to the best of my ability, and I would prefer the same life and death for our species as well.

I am not suggesting that the two are mutually exclusive. It is not impossible for us to achieve peace on Earth without abandoning our dreams of a scientific utopia. However, our culture is still incapable of extricating the avarice, aggression, and dominance that has so far accompanied scientific progress, and trying to fix that problem with only more scientific progress is a self-defeating process. To achieve the best of both worlds, we need to prioritize the world with connection and meaning, because that is the ideal. That is the world, the universe, worth living in.

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Categories Philosophy, Science

Um… maybe Straight/White/Men SHOULD get a month

Jan 21, 2015 //
1

It seems that every single group of people gets their own month, their own week, or their own day. I mean, what do white people get, outside of the Oscars? Why don’t WE get a month? Well, there are a couple reasons. But I recently read an interview with Chris Rock that illuminated something about race, and really gender and sexuality as well, that suggested to me that straight/white/men need more of a focus than they are currently receiving.

I’ll give you the relevant text from the interview:

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

What Chris Rock is saying is that, in regards to race, white people are the ones doing the progressing. Black people have always been human, with the capacity for intelligence and emotion that was long ignored in them, and to phrase race relations as black people making progress is to give the illusion that black people are the ones improving, whereas the opposite is true. White people have made great strides in becoming less moronic about the human beings that surround them, and it is white people who need to be the ones to continue to make great strides.

So why give us a month? Feminists have long argued, probably rightly so, that men do not take women seriously. There’s the old chestnut of the female executive saying something at a meeting, being ignored, and then a male colleague repeating her exact idea and being listened to, often taking the credit. It happens. However, if progressive change is to be made, would it not be logical for a male ally to be a prominent mouthpiece for the feminist movement? If feminists want to be taken seriously, and women aren’t taken seriously, why not use a man?

The artist Macklemore wrote a song called Same Love that advocated for same-sex relationships. It was a considerable blow in the fight to overcome homophobic cultural norms, but it received a great deal of criticism from gay-rights activists because Macklemore is straight. A suggestion I read was that if Macklemore wants to be an ally to the gay-rights movement, he should push homosexual rappers into the limelight, rather than hogging it for himself. Regardless of the impact that Same Love had on our culture, it was rejected by some of those that it was trying to help.

Is the goal not to overcome prejudice? Who cares who the messenger is? Well, some people do.

There is term called the Great White Saviour, and what this refers to is a white person, typically portrayed in films, that comes to care for and fight for either the Noble Savage, or the Oppressed Minority, or whoever it happens to be. You get the idea. Ol’ Whitey rolls in to town, and the great guy that he is, saves the minority and is revered as a hero. What this signifies is that white people are honourable, compassionate, moral beings, and minorities are weak and unable to do anything about their own condition.

This, of course, could apply to any such dominant figure, such as a straight person rapping about gay rights, or a man advocating for feminism, etc.

Do the voices of the dominant detract from the voices of the oppressed? Can we only ever steal credit? Comparing Hollywood’s crushing inability to properly convey progressive messages to the real-life work of advocates is a little unfair. Like relates to like, and the dominant group is going to relate most to others from the dominant group, and it’s the dominant group that needs to change. In my personal experience, it was Dr. Jackson Katz that was my first, real introduction into the world of feminism. He’s a man, by the way, if the name wasn’t a big enough indicator. The message was an important one, and because it was delivered by somebody I could relate to, I was able to listen.

If the message is good, why not pick the messenger that the people most needing to hear it will listen to?

Post-script: I am aware that this is not a new idea, and that many social justice advocates are desperate for the voices of allies. Maybe if there was a month celebrating those allies, the quieter ones would be more likely to pipe up?

I’m also not trying to disparage the work that minority rights activists do. We wouldn’t have any allies at all if they weren’t doing all the heavy lifting.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality, Politics
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