What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

This is why I shouldn’t write a blog:

The computer is addictive.

And I am an addict.

There. I’ve said it. I’m an addict.

Several years ago a psychotherapy client gave me a great definition of addiction. We used it in What A Way To Go. It is this:

Addiction is when you can never get enough of what it is you don’t REALLY want. But you keep trying.

A number of things are conspiring right now to feed and maintain my computer addiction.
The first is simply structural. Our kitchen has temporarily become my office. We are downsizing our life and the mosaic studio, which could be my office, is still stacked with unused tile and the boxes of stuff that we packed up when we moved out of half of the house. It felt great to downsize but my desk ended up where the kitchen table used to be. Now it is sitting in the middle of life, instead off in an office, away from things. My “laptop on a stick,” an IMac, has its sweet little head sticking up here, ready at any moment to respond to me. All I have to do is move the mouse and it will wake it up. And once it wakes up it will interact with me.

And the blog hasn’t helped. With this blog up, and with daily inquiries about What A Way To Go, the computer is even more seductive:

“Check your email. See what new person has found out about the movie and WANTS it (you). “

“Maybe someone wants to connect. Just check and see. It only takes a minute.”

As I learned in Intro Psychology thirty five years ago, the intermittent reinforcement schedule, where you never know when you are going to get fed, is the hardest to undo. Because you never know when that little morsel of goodness is going to respond to hitting the mouse, I mean, lever. So its a pernicious habit, er, addiction.

But look. If contact on the screen were what I really wanted I would start a correspondence with the people who have commented here. I would post comments to their comments. We would get into a lively discussion. We would get something going!

But I don’t do that. I don’t respond because I’m afraid of deepening the addiction. I’m afraid I will start things that I want to pursue. And I don’t have time. And its not what I really want.

I know what I really want. I want real relationships with people IN THE ROOM. Or even better, amongst the trees with the wind on our faces, the sounds of birds and frogs and insects, the smells of green and brown.

I want to actually be with people. Not virtually. Actually.

I’m really worried about what this technology is doing to people. I’m worried its Big Brother. Only its not that Big Brother is watching us. Its that we are watching Big Brother. I’m worried that we are so hooked on watching Big Brother that Big Brother doesn’t have to bother with watching us. We’re passive. We’re contained. We’re in front of our IMacs getting tidy little morsels of goodness in our inboxes. Tidy little morsels that keep us hooked on what it is we don’t really want.

Listen. Humans are incredibly well put together, sensitively evolved to relate to one another and the natural world. Our limbic brains have no words but they send and receive thousands of bits of information that pass between us whenever we are in one another’s presence.

Before technological industrial civilization took over we did that. We sat together. For at least 500,000 years and probably more like a million years before we started capturing our experience in the box of written language, we belonged. We belonged, first and foremost, to the real world of plants and animals and sky and water and weather and sun. In the real world our senses, our limbic brains, were bathed in sights and sounds and smells and sensations on our skin. All of that nourished us. It was what we really wanted.

Smell something. Anything. Smell a flower or baking bread or a piece of dog poop. If you can slow down enough to notice, you’ll be aware of a myriad of responses in your body. You’ll feel things. You’ll want more. Or you’ll be repulsed. But even the repulsion, if you are honest, will be interesting, stimulating.

I don’t believe in attention deficit disorder (ADD). I think people who have been diagnosed with that are not disordered. I think their environment bores them. I think our boxed up environment of cities and schools and offices and cars lacks the kinds of experiences that would bathe our senses in something truly interesting, stimulating and nourishing. People who can’t sit still just keep moving around from thing to thing, looking for what they really want. Unless they can get addicted. Or unless we drug them. Then we can get them to sit still and be satisfied with less than what they really want.

The little “hit” I get when I see that I have email or a