Continued . . . around, through and over the barricades of manipulation, persuasion and control. How to rally those who haven’t yet seen or contemplated the source of their angst and confusion.
We certainly can’t wait for or depend on government to lead us out of the darkness.
More is coming. The research doesn’t stop and neither does the living that generates the questions.
On reaching people who haven’t seen it yet — the thing I’ve learned is that leading with the analysis doesn’t work. People arrive at this through their own bodies first. A parent notices their kid can’t sit still without a screen. A worker realizes the exhaustion isn’t laziness. Someone grieves and discovers three days of bereavement leave is an insult to what their body actually needs. The felt experience comes first. The naming comes after. Our job is to be there with the language when the body has already done the work of recognition.
On government — right now government isn’t failing to lead us out. It’s actively participating. My kids’ school district is cutting language immersion programs while funding AI surveillance technology. The regulatory bodies are staffed by people who rotate between the agencies and the companies they’re supposed to regulate. The Brain Capital Index launched at Davos with government partners at the table. This isn’t absence of leadership. It’s leadership in the wrong direction. The work is ours. It always was.
Take a breath with me for a second. Just one slow one. Feel whatever’s there.
The fact that you can feel how wrong this is — that’s the very thing they’re trying to override. There are people who cannot access that in themselves any longer. And it’s still running in you, in me, in others. It’s the same capacity that allows for joy and true connection.
For at least the last 10 years, I've been trying to devise way to engage the hellscape of social media, without deploying the spiritual bypass. We have to look at it head-on. We have to face it. To swim in all this electronic bullshit as if it was a normal environment is to be consumed by it.
Thank you for your words, your thoughts, your wisdom. For your intrepid act of looking at the thing. Our bodies possess the wisdom to guide us. Yes.
Ten years of trying to face it without bypass. That’s the work. Most people either look away or drown in it. The fact that you’ve been holding that tension for a decade means your body already knows the difference between engaging and being consumed. That’s hard-won and it’s yours.
And you named the thing I keep coming back to — you can’t swim in it as if it’s a normal environment. It isn’t. The moment you treat it as normal your nervous system starts adapting to it as baseline, and then the actual baseline — your body, the room you’re in, the people in front of you — starts feeling like the disruption. That inversion is the capture.
I read this through in the middle of another sleepless night. Woken by a now familiar sense of existential dread pervading all. It helped to settle my fears and on reawakening this morning initiated a torrent of ideas and previous philosopher’s and writers warnings about our propensity to not just imagine but build self destructive systems founded in fear motivated abstractions.
Our ability to imagine, our creativity is too often curtailed into a deadly feedback loop in a fear response to losing our personal sense of privilege and control of life. Or as you so insightfully expound, to avoid doing the hard emotional work necessary to create embodied knowledge. The only true kind. This present tech broligarchy is a perfection of the unholy marriage between two such systems. The culture of individualism or celebrity and the economics of capitalism. They are all the living embodiments of fear and its wilful ignorance. Aka dumb fucks.
Herbert Marcuse and his book One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (1964), on the tragic alienation created by capitalism is the work that most comes to mind here.
Those of us who choose slow invisible embodied intelligence over these quick fix abstract solutions will continue to learn from their very stupid mistakes. The younger generations, who are currently experiencing the equivalent of a potentially deadly heroin injection of alienating celebrity capitalism, are all in the equivalent of an alchemical anthor of deep social transformation.
The fact that this found you during a sleepless night and settled something — that’s what I want the piece to do. The body processes at its own speed, and sometimes that speed is 1AM.
I appreciate the Marcuse connection. He diagnosed the flattening of interior life under industrial capitalism sixty years ago. What’s changed is the delivery mechanism. The flattening now reaches the nervous system directly, before cognition gets a vote. He saw the architecture. We’re inside the wiring.
Your point about creativity curtailed into a fear-driven feedback loop is tragically accurate. That’s what happens when imagination, which should be generative, gets captured by anticipation of loss. It turns inward toward threat and starts building fortifications instead of futures. That’s the whole civilizational problem in one sentence.
I want to hold one thing gently though. The younger generation didn’t choose this. Their nervous systems are adapting accurately to the environment they were given. The heroin metaphor works neurochemically — the mechanism is that close. But they aren’t making stupid mistakes. They’re inside a system that was engineered before they arrived. What I want for them is what I want for my own kids — the chance to build their own interior before someone offers to replace it.
Thank you for reading this the way it was meant to be read.
Thank you. We are finding our grandson (20) voluntarily asking us for books to read that will help him build a stronger interior landscape. At the moment, he is finding the interior imaginative landscape of the fiction of E.R.R.Eddison is helping him to do this.
All of this is so irritating. I refuse to be overridden
Good. That irritation is the boundary system doing its job.
Continued . . . around, through and over the barricades of manipulation, persuasion and control. How to rally those who haven’t yet seen or contemplated the source of their angst and confusion.
We certainly can’t wait for or depend on government to lead us out of the darkness.
Thank you for receiving it this way.
More is coming. The research doesn’t stop and neither does the living that generates the questions.
On reaching people who haven’t seen it yet — the thing I’ve learned is that leading with the analysis doesn’t work. People arrive at this through their own bodies first. A parent notices their kid can’t sit still without a screen. A worker realizes the exhaustion isn’t laziness. Someone grieves and discovers three days of bereavement leave is an insult to what their body actually needs. The felt experience comes first. The naming comes after. Our job is to be there with the language when the body has already done the work of recognition.
On government — right now government isn’t failing to lead us out. It’s actively participating. My kids’ school district is cutting language immersion programs while funding AI surveillance technology. The regulatory bodies are staffed by people who rotate between the agencies and the companies they’re supposed to regulate. The Brain Capital Index launched at Davos with government partners at the table. This isn’t absence of leadership. It’s leadership in the wrong direction. The work is ours. It always was.
Thank you. Thank you for the depth of your research, for your wordsmith, for your vision. Thank you for your humanity.
I look forward to reading future installments (please); contemplations to navigate
I loved reading this.
Thank you.
Thought provoking - will have to come back to this, there’s so much there. Good resources too, thanks.
Thank you for taking the time to read and to share the article!
I read this again today. Slowly. And took notes. THANK YOU.
We're living in a nightmare we can't wake from.
I hear you. Thank you for saying that.
Take a breath with me for a second. Just one slow one. Feel whatever’s there.
The fact that you can feel how wrong this is — that’s the very thing they’re trying to override. There are people who cannot access that in themselves any longer. And it’s still running in you, in me, in others. It’s the same capacity that allows for joy and true connection.
We go from here.
We will succeed--we have to.
For at least the last 10 years, I've been trying to devise way to engage the hellscape of social media, without deploying the spiritual bypass. We have to look at it head-on. We have to face it. To swim in all this electronic bullshit as if it was a normal environment is to be consumed by it.
Thank you for your words, your thoughts, your wisdom. For your intrepid act of looking at the thing. Our bodies possess the wisdom to guide us. Yes.
Ten years of trying to face it without bypass. That’s the work. Most people either look away or drown in it. The fact that you’ve been holding that tension for a decade means your body already knows the difference between engaging and being consumed. That’s hard-won and it’s yours.
And you named the thing I keep coming back to — you can’t swim in it as if it’s a normal environment. It isn’t. The moment you treat it as normal your nervous system starts adapting to it as baseline, and then the actual baseline — your body, the room you’re in, the people in front of you — starts feeling like the disruption. That inversion is the capture.
Thank you for being in this.
I read this through in the middle of another sleepless night. Woken by a now familiar sense of existential dread pervading all. It helped to settle my fears and on reawakening this morning initiated a torrent of ideas and previous philosopher’s and writers warnings about our propensity to not just imagine but build self destructive systems founded in fear motivated abstractions.
Our ability to imagine, our creativity is too often curtailed into a deadly feedback loop in a fear response to losing our personal sense of privilege and control of life. Or as you so insightfully expound, to avoid doing the hard emotional work necessary to create embodied knowledge. The only true kind. This present tech broligarchy is a perfection of the unholy marriage between two such systems. The culture of individualism or celebrity and the economics of capitalism. They are all the living embodiments of fear and its wilful ignorance. Aka dumb fucks.
Herbert Marcuse and his book One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (1964), on the tragic alienation created by capitalism is the work that most comes to mind here.
Those of us who choose slow invisible embodied intelligence over these quick fix abstract solutions will continue to learn from their very stupid mistakes. The younger generations, who are currently experiencing the equivalent of a potentially deadly heroin injection of alienating celebrity capitalism, are all in the equivalent of an alchemical anthor of deep social transformation.
The fact that this found you during a sleepless night and settled something — that’s what I want the piece to do. The body processes at its own speed, and sometimes that speed is 1AM.
I appreciate the Marcuse connection. He diagnosed the flattening of interior life under industrial capitalism sixty years ago. What’s changed is the delivery mechanism. The flattening now reaches the nervous system directly, before cognition gets a vote. He saw the architecture. We’re inside the wiring.
Your point about creativity curtailed into a fear-driven feedback loop is tragically accurate. That’s what happens when imagination, which should be generative, gets captured by anticipation of loss. It turns inward toward threat and starts building fortifications instead of futures. That’s the whole civilizational problem in one sentence.
I want to hold one thing gently though. The younger generation didn’t choose this. Their nervous systems are adapting accurately to the environment they were given. The heroin metaphor works neurochemically — the mechanism is that close. But they aren’t making stupid mistakes. They’re inside a system that was engineered before they arrived. What I want for them is what I want for my own kids — the chance to build their own interior before someone offers to replace it.
Thank you for reading this the way it was meant to be read.
Thank you. We are finding our grandson (20) voluntarily asking us for books to read that will help him build a stronger interior landscape. At the moment, he is finding the interior imaginative landscape of the fiction of E.R.R.Eddison is helping him to do this.
Simply, humanely, beautiful thank you.