media as mirror

the existential noodling continues

Brew yourself a cuppa (or pour a glass) and buckle up. This one is long and rambling and is only vaguely related to writing. You’re forewarned. 😎

I just finished watching the Netflix series, Sweet Tooth. I’m late to that party but whatever, I usually am. I managed to slide in just in time to catch the third, and I’m assuming, final season. This one is going to stay with me for a while.

Humans are the disease, The Sick is the cure

If you don’t know, it’s a post-apocalyptic scenario with 98% of the world’s population being wiped out by a virus, known as The Sick (sound familiar?). Simultaneously, children are being born as animal-human hybrids. Cue the worst kinds of human behaviour - it’s not hard to imagine. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say it felt like the right one.

I, among others, had high hopes for the post-lockdown, COVID-19 world. I remember the marvels of swans in the Venice canals and clean air over China. And yet…here we are.

baby blackberries

Right before I watched the final two episodes of Sweet Tooth, I stumbled across an interview with Mark Boyle. Mr. Boyle has written a couple of books, the most recent being The Way Home which tells of his complete disconnect from the world of technology and his new way of life in a self-built cottage in rural Ireland. I love this book. I have underlined and page-flagged and pondered it often. Having watched this interview, I plan on reading it again. The two things together - the interview and the conclusion of the series have me thinking a lot about my own values around technology, how I want to be in the world, and how far I’ve strayed from that ideal.

I rarely (never) watch the news, but every once in a while I’m sitting in a waiting room (this time, for the optometrist) and there’s the ubiquitous television screen. (Why can’t we have magazines?) These screens are invariably tuned in to CP24 which, here, is a 24 hour news channel with multiple moving parts - several tickers, weather and traffic inserts, advertising and some talking head relaying the latest death and destruction In other words, it’s a sensory nightmare in all ways possible. I happened to glance at the screen and in the span of less than five minutes (as long as I can bear), one of the tickers on the bottom relayed news of several devastating storms/climate-related crises while the advertising square offered discounted flights to all points of the globe, sales on various clothing items and a new housing development (I think, it may have been holiday rentals).

Anyway.

Surely, I’m not the only one who’s joining the dots here?

baby poppies

Here’s the thing: I have a very real conviction that our various consumerist addictions are destroying our planet. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial viewpoint at this stage - or maybe it is (the attitudes and opinions of certain parts of the population continue to baffle me). I see it as documented fact. Watching the interview with Mark Boyle, I was reminded how my conviction extends to our preoccupation with the digital world, in that our chronic disconnection from the natural world is destroying our brains¹ alongside the planet.

It’s hard not to come over all conspiracy-theorist and insist that corporations are quietly and insidiously attempting (and succeeding) to distract us from a world on fire by slowly melting our brains so they can continue the rape-and-pillage-for-profit that defines Business. Okay, a tad dramatic, but let’s face it, not that far-fetched.

horrifying dystopian imagery

Confession: I have no real idea where this is going. If I were a Proper Writer, I’d corral my thoughts into a well-crafted essay. Deep breath and read on, if you dare. 🤓

I wrote in my last post about the unease I feel at being a part of the distraction machine. Even writing this, imagining that I’ll post it to a massive digital platform, is just one more drop in the bucket, one more thing to pull people from their lives. And yet, there’s a deeply ingrained message that tells me it would be somehow wrong of me to not share my thoughts on this. Where did that messaging come from? Is it yet another vile scheme to have us provide more ‘content’? I believe that’s true of social media, perhaps less so here on Substack. Still, I would much rather be having this conversation around a dinner table, or sitting by a fire. I’d rather be speaking with people, than at them. I mean, that’s just a whole other issue, isn’t it? We² don’t know how to converse in a civilized fashion anymore - we just shout our opinions at one another.

I digress.

In the interview, Mr. Boyle speaks of the circumstances of feeling truly alive. He describes cycling ten miles through the rain to catch fish for his dinner, then back again. He describes the feeling of coming back to his fire, hungry and cold, and the bone-deep satisfaction of the warmth of the flames and the food in his belly, that feeling of aliveness in the moment. I know exactly what he means - I spent most of my life, up until the last four years, working outdoors in very physical jobs. I know the feeling of happy-exhaustion, of how good it feels to wrap cold hands around a warm mug, of looking back over a day of hard work. Good³ work. That felt more real, more true to me than sitting in front of a computer as I do now.

I’ve struggled since moving here, not gonna lie. I thought it was burnout and the trauma of the move (it was), I thought it was the hormonal fu*kwittery of perimenopause (it was) combined with the dystopia of the covid lockdowns (it was); it was all those things and it was the shift from a mostly outdoor life to a mostly indoor one. It was not having nature on my doorstep, it was not having physical work, out in the elements followed by time spent riding and caring for my own horse, and then more time outside when I came home when there were chickens and a garden to tend and acres to walk on with my children.

It was suddenly having unlimited internet and everything that entailed.

I miss our chickens

When we lived in Troy we had satellite internet - which was slow and only offered 10GB of data every month between all four of us. We couldn’t really watch any video content, though towards the end we had the lowest-quality option of Netflix (do they even offer that anymore, or do they assume everyone has high-speed internet?) where we could watch an hour a day and not run out of data. I used it primarily to read blogs and write my own; the uploading of photos took ages and slowed the whole process down. At the time, it felt like an annoyance. Now, I look back and see that it was a gift.

There were all kinds of things wrong with that life we were living - the house was a moldering ruin, we froze in winter and our chickens were regularly slaughtered by raccoons and a fox. We all have some deep and lasting (lower-case ’t’) trauma around our seven years there. Still, there are some fundamental elements about it that I want to recreate, starting with how much time I spend on the internet.

even the dock was falling to bits

I don’t believe we all need to live in off-grid cabins or work on a farm to feel that feeling of aliveness that Mr. Boyle talked about — it’s about what constitutes meaningful activity for each person — but I do think we need to be less in our heads and more in our bodies, however that looks. I think we need to get our hands in dirt and our eyes on green things. Comfort and convenience is slowly killing us; it’s being advertised to us as life and time-saving, but what are we doing with all of that life, all of that spare time? Staring at a screen? Getting caught in an endless feedback loop of misery-want-acquisition?

I don’t have answers, only more questions. I don’t think this is a black and white situation, there’s no absolute right or absolute wrong. There very rarely is, is there? I can acknowledge the gifts of technology and I also acknowledge the consequences. At this point in the technology timeline, I think the consequences are far outweighing the gifts.

I’ve seen both sides: I lived many, many years without internet (it wasn’t invented yet) and quite a few with minimal internet. And now I’ve lived for four with unlimited access. I have enough information now to make an educated decision - I know how I feel, I know how it impacts the quality of my life. I understand where it benefits me and I see where it erodes my well-being.

a patch of wild amid the suburban lawnscape

I want to unplug more this summer and let myself get tired and dirty and sweaty and hungry — to feel the genuine aliveness of being in this world. I want to read books and get mosquito bites and push paint around. I want to have time to think about how I want to show up in this space, and others — to be a force of something positive, something creative, rather than distracting and destructive. I have ideas, things I’d like to start, including turning on paid subscriptions, because I actually want to start making some kind of living from my writing. But I want to do it in a way that feels good to me, which means without gatekeeping, without barriers to access. There’s too much of that here already — too much exclusion based on economic capacity. I think the world has enough of that without me adding to it. I’m trusting I’ll come up with a comfortable middle-ground.

the last of the honeysuckle

We had every opportunity to start doing things differently after lockdown but most people have slid comfortably back into pre-lockdown habits, myself included. Granted, mine aren’t as detrimental to the planet as some, but they’re taking a toll on my own well-being, nonetheless. I’m hoping that some time spent remembering where I came from will provide the necessary course-correction. Maybe then I can offer up an alternative way of being by example. I’m one of those starry-eyed idealists who believse that art⁴ saves and one way it does that is by showing us where we’re going wrong and then how to make better choices.

Now feels like a good time to make some.

1. I also think it’s eroding our souls, but I don’t think there’s documented evidence of that yet

2. This is a variation on the royal ‘we’ — an obseration of internet culture at large

3. That’s subjective, I know…though I unabashedly claim care of the land and creatures to be ‘good’.

4. By ‘art’, I mean all forms of creative expression