Mostly Dead

I tried to write this intro for about an hour and failed miserably… Well actually I tried for a few minutes and then played a game of blitz chess. This cycle repeated a few times until an hour had passed, did I spend an hour writing?

I’ve been doing that lately. I find a distraction that I can justify as productive and do it unproductively. I delete all the apps on my phone and just keep Substack, then I catch myself scrolling Substack. I get rid of everything except the news, I feel like a sophisticated gentleman, a man of the world. But I’m not Don Draper reading the morning paper, I’m just another guy scrolling an app on his phone, again.

how i feel reading a substack article on my phone for 45 seconds until i go back to scrolling notes

Sometimes tabs open on my computer without my will. Like someone has hacked into my brain and hit a few keys before the real me interrupts and now I’m looking at Twitter.

Sometimes I get so annoyed at myself for not being able to control the only function that separates me from the animals. Then I get sad thinking about how many others don’t even have that moment of being aware of it. Somehow even chess has been turned into a dopamine weapon aimed at my attention span. Don’t forget to play or your streak will end!!!

this shit should be illegal

There has been so much written about how we need to get off screens, but it doesn’t change the fact we are all addicts who didn’t ask to be injected. It’s much harder to quit than to never start. We are MKUltra victims on the grandest scale of them all. Much like an angry teenager screaming at their parents that they didn’t ask to be born, I didn’t ask to be so integrated with technology. To resist the gravitational pull each day is exhausting.

I recently watched the movie Awakenings. It’s a true story about patients who suffered from a unique disease in the early 1900s, their dopamine sensors were fried and they sat in a frozen state for decades. A Doctor (Oliver Sacks) came around and gave them a drug that woke them up for a while, it turned out that they were fully functioning and conscious underneath but time passed them by.

Some felt like they blinked and woke up 30 years later in an older body, others returned mid-conversation to a chat from a decade ago. Unfortunately, the effects of the drug were temporary and they would degenerate back to their frozen state over time. Temporarily returned to full function and awareness then rapidly returned to permanent unconsciousness. In that time of degradation they would just stop functioning, in need of a push to snap back to reality.

Mid-sentence, in the middle of writing or dancing, something would break and they would just freeze… until they were pushed. They needed outside stimulation to go for a little while and then they would return to their lucid coma. One patient said it was like being dead until someone brought them back to life with a little touch.

A bit like me opening chess dot com and playing a game for no fucking reason. I am completely lost until my girlfriend questions why I’m screeching about a ‘fucking mouse slip’ and I snap back to my original task.

Initially it reminded me of my first car, I have no idea about cars so I won’t pretend to describe the issue but if it hit zero revs it turned off. I would have to slowly approach a roundabout ensuring that at no point I came to a complete stop or the car would turn off. That was my first thought, then I had another which depressed me.

I thought about how it serves as a much wider metaphor for the state of the world. We are all in a technology-induced lucid coma as our default state. The second we are away from outside stimulation we are dead. We pick up our phones and scroll, in these moments I believe we die. We are severed from reality. The world we are seeing is some dream-state where different AI models compete to atrophy our brains.

Here are some quotes from the Doctor in the ward:

“They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life. They were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies.”

And on their day to day state:

“They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference.”

The state being described is the ideal state that the tech companies want us to be in. We’ve somehow normalised the term ‘rotting’ when referring to sitting on the couch scrolling reels. We understand how bad it is for us but blah blah go meditate how do you expect me to stop?

sam altman’s dream

The sad part is that none of what I said surprises anyone. I too have read books and articles telling me to spend less time on screens. I log onto Twitter to tell people they should log off Twitter. It is like this collective crisis that we are all aware of but can’t seem to take action against.

Then we look for the silver bullet. Getting a ‘dumb phone’ so we can get off social media, putting our phones in black and white mode, screen time limits. There is no remedy to this addiction, we just need to accept that we are dead when we are using it.

That’s it. Sometimes it is worth it because you are communicating with others or planning interesting things but during that time you were not in the land of the living. You reduced your conscious time on this planet. Would you disagree? If I spent 50 years looking at my phone and you spent 30 without technology, who has lived a longer life?

If enlightenment is the space between thought, then we need to give ourselves that space. From now on I am considering myself dead if I spend time on certain things, I think we can all define for ourselves what apps or things reduce us to a zombified state of indifference.

dead

It is difficult because I want to help people while knowing that in order to do so I’ll have to spend more time dead. Right now I’m on a screen typing this, but I’m not scrolling and I feel in control of my mind. I have temporarily defeated my chess demons. I am coherent, I’m aware of the time passing, I know why I’m here and am present in this moment.

Writing long form helps my brain function correctly and makes me feel like I am fighting the current state of character limits and reels. I don’t want to become a frozen statue that can only be awakened by outside stimuli, I want to be the outside stimulus for others.

I want to fight my itchy fingers in the line at the grocery store, I want to just sit still and ponder the universe while I wait at the restaurant. I don’t want to be a part of this sick game that has been played on the world, but I don’t want to re-enact Into the Wild or rock a Nokia 3310.

I’m just going to continue to seek balance and accept that I die a little bit every day. Just like everything else, we can only appreciate life by contemplating death. Each time I snap out of my transient screen-state I’m going to imagine the frozen patients who got to live for a few weeks before the drug wore off.

My entire life will be lived in those moments when the drug temporarily wears off. When my phone is at home and the colour returns to the world again. I will try to savour those moments when I am separated from death, because they are the only moments I actually have left to live.