Shattered consciousness

Last time on Tirades, rants and other things ignored:

I cancelled my Facebook account a while ago. I'd found that I was obsessing over it the way an alcoholic obsesses over that next drink.

I also found that I was becoming a monster, a ranting screaming sort that acted more of a troll than a man. So. Not for me.

And now:

As if this blog weren't enough.... (insert self-deprecating laughter here)

However, as I had lost contact with several people there, one who is a good friend IRL sent me a note full of angst. I understood what he was saying in that email, and the more I thought about my response to him.

Being connected to the world is IMHO a good thing. We can communicate without boundaries, and I truly believe that the more we understand about our fellow humans, the less likely we are to think of them as something other than less than human... Q.E.D., it goes to follow.

However...

My son in law and I were discussing music one eve, as we are wont to do, and while we were talking, he was waiting for a web page to load, and the longer the page took the more annoyed he became. Finally, after I chided him about his lack of patience, he said: You don't seem to understand. Our generation wants everything at a click.

A statement that, had it been said twenty years ago, would have been meaningless... but now, I see that he was correct, and more... or less, as the case seems to be.

By our collective interconnected instantaneous response to the World As We Know It, we as a culture seem to have lost the capacity for reflection, which means a death of contemplation.

The more I thought about it, and thought about the note my friend had sent, the more I kept coming back to a simple phrase that I have now heard so often that once I repeat it here, you, dear reader, may say, that sounds like me....

Ready?

I need a vacation. Not from work; from my life.

Indeed: so it would seem.

During the first week I disconnected from FB, I noticed something that can adequately be described by an album title: The Roaring Silence. There was a sensation of total quiet, a type of emotional solitude that I had not known in quite a while, and it made me to grow uncomfortable with my self.

As time continued, I so desperately wanted to go back to the noise of Facebook that I struggled, every day, to NOT do so. It was an addiction, an alluring sense of being with others... and I thought to a moment in the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

The moment is during a group therapy session, and the villainous Nurse Ratched is speaking down to one of her wards (as she is wont to do both in film and novel), mentioning that this patient had withdrawn from the others during the day. One of the men present, possibly the man being quizzed (I forget), says, "Are you saying it is wrong to want to be alone sometimes?"

The accuracy of the moment and quote notwithstanding, the fact is: people need a moment alone. We need the quiet, the moment of contemplative thought, we need the book and candle and peace.

Consider: the more interconnected we have become, and the more information that floods in, the less time we have, the less focus on the things that we, ourselves, cherish that the rest of the world has but a nanosecond, or less. We do not have time to process what is coming in, and thus cannot consider the ramifications for anything more than a moment.

Our collective subconscious is falling apart, the world about us is charging in and that which is most private, that thing that is the self separate from the rest, is being drowned in minutiae.

Of what value are the latest antics of some Hollywood actor when we ourselves have our own lives to live? Vicariously we surrender our own souls to be part of a greater whole...

This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but the whimper of you have been sent a friend request. Click here.