The Mind That Consumes Itself
Every person has an instinct to solve problems whether they know it or not. Everyday we’re problem solving some surface-level issue in our lives, whether it’s maximizing the number of grocery bags that you can carry inside from the car, or finding the perfect ASMR video to fall asleep to. We’re constantly seeking to perfect the subjective experience of our day-to-day existence.
It’s no coincidence that Covid-19 is more than anything a mental health pandemic. People feeling isolated have experienced novel cases of anxiety and depression expounded by the over-reliance on remote work. Dating, work, and our social lives all operate on a virtual network that does more to enhance our feeling of isolation rather than connectedness.
Facebook recently rebranded itself to Meta in an attempt to assuage any fears that they were doing more harm than good to society. They are now a company based entirely on the premise of living in an age of digital connectedness, with the ability to interact with anyone, anywhere, and experience the life you’d always dreamed of.
Technology has done amazing things to increase opportunities for online entrepreneurs by reducing all barriers to entry. Yet technology can no longer be mapped onto problems that are uniquely human. We cannot supplant the need for intimacy, for example, with parasocial relationships. While these relationships do help, they are an inorganic substitute for the connection we feel when we are with another real human being.
Similarly, we cannot use technology to raise children. Phrases like “iPad Parenting” have become synonymous with letting your children raise themselves in order for parents to win back some “me time.” The bi-product of such parenting behavior is children who develop inadequate theory of mind, leading to a meteoric rise in the cases of autism across the United States.
When we lose our capacity for boredom as a society, we begin to carve our own path to self-destructive behavior by entertaining ourselves to death.
Addiction comes in many forms, yet we’ve grown accustomed to our handheld devices over the years and begin to view it as an innocuous part of our lives. When we silently acquiesce, our mental health begins to suffer.
As you scroll infinitely through the ether of your feed, caught somewhere between the picture of your friend in the Bahamas, and the photo of the instagram model in Bali, you start to feel it, somewhere deep down in your gut. You can’t articulate what this feeling is, percolating in the background of your mind, because it only accompanies the need for the next dopamine hit like a bad aftertaste in your mouth.
It grows as your life carries on, and you begin to see all the wasted years of living someone else’s life through the screen of your phone beginning to take its toll on your mental health. This gnawing feeling is your conscience being drowned out by the dopamine-inducing offer of unlimited information.
The perfection of technology combined with the imperfection of our own human nature combines to put us at a net loss. We are struggling to understand the meaning of living in an interconnected world with our sense-making apparatus being drastically misaligned with reality. When we interact with someone in real life, whether that be approaching a stranger on the street or being in an argument with your best friends, our ability to effectively communicate our feelings is blunted by our habitual existence as an observer behind the screen, similar to someone experiencing erectile dysfunction due to porn addiction.
The pursuit of meaning, by taking on the important responsibilities of adulthood, is obfuscated by hedonic humanism, an attempt to delay the biological onset of aging by doing what feels good right now. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in Homo Deus, liberal humanism is the new philosophy of our time, exemplified by phrases like “If it feels good, then do it!”
My only critique of liberal humanism is when it fails to take into account the other side of the coin. Every action has consequences; when you go out for three days non-stop, your mental health pays the price afterwards. When you spend your life doing only things that are only fun, rather than subjecting yourself to painful experiences, you are possibly setting yourself up for more painful experiences later in life.
Essentially, when hedonic humanism becomes maladaptive, as is the case with most addictions, then it is time to make a change.
In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson details that a better measure of subjective well-being is how you deal with negative experiences in life. Choosing what negative experiences you want to deal with is often the driver of success. It’s impossible to live a life completely devoid of misery since human civilization hasn’t reached this type of Huxley utopia just yet.
The question then is: is it possible to maximize our subjective experience in the short time we have on this planet and simultaneously take on meaningful responsibilities? To do so, you need to find acalling.
Men Without Purpose
In Pre- World War I England there existed a similar crisis resembling what many men are going through today. Although we think of problems approximating existential crises to being uniquely millennial or a bi-product of living in digital landscape, we are experiencing much of the same social dilemmas that plagued our ancestors as well.
Men in pre-World War I (known then as the Great War) England were suffering lives devoid of meaning. Witnesses described that men had reached a state of catatonia and apathy unlike they had ever seen, and no one could explain what had happened.
As soon as the war broke out, there was a surge in demand of ambulance drivers, and many of the previously depressed men now had a new purpose that was externally forced into their lives, rendering their previous nihilistic existences a new meaningful purpose to live by.
Psychotherapist Adam Lane Smith characterizes male depression to be uniquely different than female depression. Whereas female depression is rooted in social isolation, perhaps due to a pandemic or ostracism, male depression builds off of the idea that a man without a purpose loses his will to live.
Living your entire life entertaining yourself to death (literally), distracting yourself from the proverbial elephant in the room, or, as Jordan Peterson puts it, the “dragon under the rug,” only leads to the problem growing inside. Repression does very much the opposite of what we are led to believe, and increases the magnitude of an uncomfortable issue that we are avoiding.
Social media is the most convenient distraction the world has ever experienced, and its effects render people in catatonic states of apathy like those seen among men in England at the turn of the century. The pain associated with confronting an issue is so unbearable that we let our dopamine hit from the next YouTube video drown out our inner-worries.
The Western model of treating psychopathological disorders like anxiety and depression is very much based on treating the symptoms with medication, essentially insulating oneself to the inner-critic, the unruly upstairs neighbor. If one were to take another perspective, and think of their anxiety as a sign, some element of their deeper conscience trying to communicate a message to them, then they would take the meaningful steps to change their life for the better.
When we are in the wrong environment where we lack a sense of purpose, whether this means being stuck in the wrong career or in a situation where your skills are not being used aptly, we use dopamine as a form of escape. In this way we are all dopamine-aholics, addicted to avoiding the issues that warrant our immediate attention.
Our ability to problem-solve our way to a purposeful existence is complicated by distraction, something that was perhaps not as easily accessible 100 years ago as it is today. The reason the self-help industry has exploded over the past 20 years is that it sells an ideal that every individual intrinsically desires.
If you were stuck at a stoplight 30 years ago, you would probably gaze off into the distance wondering about what you would have for dinner that night. Nowadays, most people see the opportunity at the spotlight as a moment to check their Instagram feed or Snapchat.
As I said before, social media isn’t the problem, it’s an underlying lack of purpose in our lives. The men from pre-world War I England were able to reinvigorate their lives with meaning when duty called, yet we lack this sense of urgency in a decadent society like ours.
Our uniquely modern dilemma is that we’re too busy distracting ourselves to to understand the urgency of this issue before it’s too late.