Reducing my intake of digital "fast food"
on becoming a maker of human beauty
Words are beautiful to me. With simple positioning, this word here, that word there, new worlds can be made in real time. We can make beautiful ones that nourish or generously stretch our hearts and minds or we can use them to grab and hold attention in a raucous economy.
This has always been true, but never to such an extent- thanks to the access offered by the devices that live (alongside social media) in our jean pockets.
Welcome to the fast food culture of our digital age. Recently, I’ve felt a withering, a sickening. Like I’ve had too much to eat of something that’s not good for me. This particular experience coincided with a real stomach bug that laid me in bed for a good 24 hours. During this time, I didn’t have the energy to read a book or chip away at a recent chapter of my book. So I surfed the internet because it felt like the easiest thing to do as I took small sips of Ginger ale.
In my case, I flittered between various news apps- the Times, the Guardian, CBC and Atlantic. When I became familiar with the headlines and the major articles of the day, I’d check my work and personal email inboxes, followed by punctuations of Instagram and Facebook. I noticed that I had a mounting anxiety about the state of politics- caught by my attention to every move, every sneeze of a particular President, and the myriad of reactions (counter moves and N-95 protection) that followed. My anxiety was coupled with significant helplessness. To counter the latter, I’d diligently check “work” business, hoping that there was something to solve or fix, even though few folks were asking, given that I was on holiday.
To be transparent, I was knowingly doing this against my better judgment. A part of me, while partaking in an addiction to the political drama-rama, was clearly dismayed by my inability to curtail the consumption. My cell phone had hooked me. The headlines, with their outrage, shame and fear-mongering, kept me pinned. I must admit I couldn’t muster enough resistance to what scholars call the commodification of attention. I was bought, through and through, by companies who knew how to spin my emotions into a frenzy.
If I knew more, perhaps I can do something useful.
If I knew more, perhaps I can plan my next move.
If I knew more, perhaps I will know what side to be on.
If I knew more, perhaps my future self will thank me for being prepared.
All of it, went down with a gag, like an oyster on a late summer’s night. At the end of a long day, I wished I had thrown up, literally and metaphorically. I wanted to get rid of the pain and agony that I’d knowingly and unknowingly caused.
*
Wonder of wonders, a week later I woke up to the gift of Maria Popova’s recent newsletter on solitude, inspired by theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s essay in his 1960’s Disputed Questions. Maria’s gift is her ability to unearth the veins of human gold that skein through our bedrock of philosophers, artists and scientists, many of whom I can still find in my parent’s library. On one of my last visits home, I actually took an early $1.95 version of Disputed Questions, the margins of which were scribbled with vulnerable reflections of my parents.
After I read Maria’s letter, I felt calm and deeply nourished. I couldn’t help but think that I’d been doing the very opposite of what I suggest to my leadership clients who grapple with overwhelm. Instead of curating my consumption, I’d been “living inside the news” as UK journalist Oliver Burkeman explores in his book Meditations for Mortals. It struck me, then and there, that you and I have a profound and radical choice. Like the adage we are what we eat, I realize more clearly than ever that we think what we consume.
As a thought experiment, I wondered what it might be like if I inversed my intake of “fast food” digital and replaced it with the quality of wonder found on my own bookshelf. What if I gifted more of my attention to the lineage of thinkers that have raised me? Those temple-builders of curiosity that initiate the kind of gasps that come when you forget space-time?
While I am not anti-social media or adverse to the hook of a headline, I am discovering that in times like this that its the makers of beauty who nourish me. Defined by their openness to life and insatiable curiosity that allows wonder to widen, these makers are the ordinary among us. They are not just philosophers or formal artists, but our friends and neighbors who listen carefully to birdsong, tomato saplings or glaciers. To what it takes to split wood, pluck bluegrass or cook a rich moose stew.
Human beauty comes from our willingness to create whether with words, art, matter or ideas. While the result might deliver you into the very identity you believe you should inhabit (an “informed citizen”), being knowledgeable is not the primary goal. For beauty, the primary goal is tasting creation itself. Or to become we might say, a “citizen who is most alive”. Instead of being armed with facts one is draped in awe- even in the midst of unsettling uncertainty.
While keeping up with the news is crucial to say, maintain a solid grasp on the threat to your country’s sovereignty- there’s a point of diminishing returns. Living off of the fast food of digital culture (whether news or social or both) and consuming until it makes you ill, only renders your creativity moot as you get sick on your own fear.
I’m not making any radical declarations that I’m off social media forever. Nor am I promising myself to divest from all the news apps. But I am revelling in simple feedback loops, noticing makes me feel good, better and best on any given day. And right now, I’m drawn to learning from others and becoming someone that is present enough to taste the fullness of being alive. Someone who spends more of her time inviting in the solitude of our planetary heart. Someone who re-members, however clumsily, to follow the sweet fragrance of our human goodness.
And to do that, I must follow the vein of my own.
xo,
Jennifer