Zen and the consumption of quality

I used to get irritated when people answered their cell phones at the dinner table, in a private conversation, during a meeting, or at the movies.  

Then, the problem became worse. 

People weren’t just answering calls, they were texting, emailing, angry birding, foursquaring, tweeting, youtubing, and uploading embarrassing photos taken fifteen seconds ago onto Facebook.  I first encountered this back in America, where the decorum if your phone rings in company is to silence it and apologize.  In Israel, if you don’t answer the phone, people around you get nervous.  What’s wrong with you, they ask.  Go on, answer it.  Right about then they’ll start getting fidgety. 

But living in a foreign land, you have to get used to some of the customs, even if back home they would be considered rude.  So I’ve relaxed a little on this one.  I even catch myself answering my cell phone without hesitation sometimes, like when I’m sitting with friends for a coffee.  But in reality, there’s not much difference nowadays between people’s behavior with their cellphones in the States versus in Israel, nor in people’s perception of that behavior.  The pervasiveness of our internet technology has simply become accepted.  It’s a quirk of modernity.  Revolutions are organized on Facebook, and Chavez tweets when he comes safely through surgery.  Nobody blinks.

On the surface, maybe there’s nothing wrong with this.  Times change.  People like their phones.  Hell, they love them.  They connect with their friends and their families through them.  You can skype with your parents across the ocean any instant on your smartphone.  How is that bad? 

And before I go further…  I would like to emphasize that I am not a Luddite.  In fact I quite like and am fascinated by technology.  After all, I’m a scientist, and it would be hard to get up in the morning if I felt that technology was evil.  But I also appreciate that the more powerful any tool, the more potential it has for destruction. 

The technology we’ve spawned in our collective garage is insidious because it seems so innocuous, and because it is just so damn useful.  If the internet could cause catastrophic heart failure and psychological unraveling, we would have it classified as a schedule 1 drug.  But it doesn’t cause these.  It affects us on a different plane, one about which society is curiously silent.  This is what I want to talk about in this blog post.

No, I’m not interested now in talking about the societal mores or the ways we have co-opted, or coped with, the internet.  I’m not going to comment on how smartphones upset and annoy friends of the user, or about how they’ve changed interactions between people.

Rather, I want to talk about the effects of these technologies on the self, about what all these interruptions do to us psychologically.  About how these technologies have been specifically designed, with our tacit or even explicit encouragement, to become ever more interruptive, to wedge into ever more parts of our life, to a point that they’ve started to creep everywhere and into everything, while reality itself has sometimes begun to feel like the interruption.  I want, in short, to talk about the death of our Zen, and about the internet’s voracious consumption of quality.

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My appreciation of the problem grew slowly and imperceptibly, just as the problem itself did.  Yes, there was TV beforehand, but that was never as insidious.  Nobody has to have TV up in front of them all day for their job.  TV also isn’t personal like email is.  TV never calls you by name.  By the time I had email and facebook and an rss feed cycling through my head and my computer screen like a gaudily lit merry-go-round almost all times of day, I knew that there was definitely something amiss.  But the problem was vague and amorphous, and I saw the solution as an issue of management, i.e., of being as productive as possible while not allowing the internet to distract me too much.  The story took on a new flavor for me only recently when I came across this blog post:

http://www.componentowl.com/blog/2012/02/zen-coder-vs-distraction-junkie/

The post focuses on work habits and assumes that your priority is productivity.  But its insight and advice apply equally well to just about any activity in modern life, and its conclusions touch upon something deeper than merely optimizing work output.  Here’s a brief summary:

Zen guys sit and focus at work for long stretches, in between which they get up and take breaks.  Distraction junkies use the little times in between other tasks to check the internet, and their focus goes straight out the window.  Nowadays, almost everyone is a distraction junky.  If you want to be effective, do what it takes to be a Zen guy. 

The thing that I instantly realized is that this problem is much bigger than how effective we are at work, or how often we check our smartphones when we’re in the company of friends, or how often we get fidgety when there isn’t a screen nearby we can play with.  These are all merely symptoms. 

The problem is that, by allowing ourselves to be served mental junkfood in every part of our lives, we have forfeited our spiritual wholeness.  Our twitch to check Facebook, email, twitter, news sites, blog posts, youtube videos, and all of the other distractions available to us does something terrible to our brains.

It pulls us out of the moment. 

It fragments our Zen. 

It breaks up our presence.

It disengages us from reality. 

Achieving presence is the goal of meditation and yoga, and it is one of the highest teachings of most religions and spiritual practices.  Presence is total immersion.  It’s an appreciation of what’s happening around you right now, your role in it, its effects on you, the interplay between your setting and yourself and your emotions.  It’s breathing in the slow or sometimes fast pace of an instant, not remembering it later but actually experiencing it now.  The disagreement between different schools and philosophies isn’t typically over whether we should achieve presence, it’s merely about the specifics; what does presence mean exactly, and how can we get there, as individuals or as a society.  We are offered many paths to the self. 

Some will walk a path to fulfillment and others won’t.  But the point is, we’re distracted from even thinking about this journey if we’re obsessively clicking our email.  You can’t achieve Zen if you can’t even focus on the moment, at any moment.  Your mind is just fragmented. 

And if you think about it, we all have succumbed to this fragmentation to such a degree that it’s considered normal.  Multitasking is all the rage.  Even the President of the United States refused to give up his blackberry.  How is this possible?  Wouldn’t somebody from a different, naïve culture, recoil in horror upon seeing this dystopia?  Is Aldous Huxley off somewhere laughing hysterically or perhaps crying?  When I ride the bus in the morning, I see dozens of people, every day, each in their own world with their headphones on, hunched down over their smartphones, eyes slightly glazed, tuned out, turned off.  Nobody is actually present.  Parents are delighted that iPads are intuitive enough for kids, and elementary schoolers have iPhones.  We’re training our youth how to defocus. 

Our families and friends might be concerned if we’re not achieving our personal potential and Zen state, but our employers and the government have no opinion.  They are only concerned about the internet insofar as it reduces or increases productivity, and solutions will be aimed towards that arena.  This is like solving mass cocaine addiction by looking at the minority of people for whom cocaine is destroying their work habits, and instituting standards about when they are allowed to snort up.  This despite the fact that we have digital cocaine spilling out of our work monitors and our smartphones everywhere we go, and releasing its sweet stench in our coffeeshops and our homes.  It ignores the fact that each of us in society, those hopelessly addicted to the drug and those who just dabble, is forfeiting real experience for a chemically induced and instantaneous payoff, and that we are giving up the most important part of humanity in the process.  Cocaine doesn’t hurt companies, it hurts people.

There’s a terrible movie with Adam Sandler called Click, in which Adam gets a remote control that allows him to fast-forward the boring parts of his life.  It quickly all blows out of control, of course, and he misses all the moments that make life worth living.  The movie is spectacularly stupid, but the theme is a real one, and I think it’s a choice we all have today more than ever.  We have remote controls—our smartphones and our internet browsers—that can make boring parts go by faster.  But there’s a real cost to clicking the button.  Feel a little antsy?  Try closing your eyes for a moment and breathing.  Got a moment in between work tasks?  Take a short walk outside and feel the sunshine.  Got a buzz from your smartphone because a friend tweeted?  Deactivate the automatic buzzing, and requisition your responses to 15 minutes in the evening.  Do you think anyone will notice?  Will they be angry you didn’t tweet back instantly?  Within a day, you’ll feel a little bit more whole again.  Your long-lost feeling of presence will return just a bit to you.  You’ll smile more, smell the air more, feel the wind more.  And you’ll probably realize that sometimes a little silence can say more to you than the endless, mindless interruptions of your internet.