I don’t think I mentioned it here, but one of the movies which influenced me most when I was that certain age (20-ish) was the movie Bliss, from Australia. It’s a wild ride, but Barry Otto does a great job. It was quite controversial at the time–you will see why if you watch it–particularly since I think the Australian version of PBS or something close to it funded it. It may have even been shown on TV. That part I’m not sure about.
Anyway, having made a short story long, the long and short of that movie is that, as Thoreau said, the majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
For myself, I continue to worry about the businesses that will fail, and the jobs it will take with them. I worry about the already poor and marginal. I know for myself I’ve had period where it hurt to go to the grocery store because I couldn’t afford anything I wanted, and of course many people can’t even do that, so they are going to soup kitchens or the equivalent. Our own government has forced us into Depression era conditions. For what, we will find out, but I really hope everyone gets really really pissed and never forgets if it is largely for nothing.
But again, having circled the farm, I find my sense of time improving. I’m less impatient, and staying with things longer. I am very very certainly technology addicted and finding that weaning myself is something very needed for my happiness: now, middle term and very certainly long term.
It’s ironic, but the Fear of Missing Out bred by the endless loops and notifications and what not causes us, frequently, to miss out on whatever is in front of us.
I could perhaps call our world, with everybody staring at phones all day, and TV’s and computers, and tablets, the Era of Half Attention. Half attention everywhere you look, with everyone you look at, who is not at that moment in the middle of a specific task.
I am realizing this clearly for myself. I am alone. I live alone and although I have places I go, really no fixed office or regular set of people I see regularly outside of bars, and I’m trying to largely give that up too.
But being alone has value too. It is a learned skill. It is a skill I am learning. Put more accurately: I’m learning to be alone and enjoy it, without feeling I am missing anything important, and without pining for that special someone who, in my case, really would make me unhappy unless they truly were special.
And I won’t become a hermit. All my plans remain intact. But someone who does not NEED people is at an intrinsic advantage in reading them, and in helping them.
And not NEEDING people–rather, taking pleasure in their company, being happy in their company, but not being desperate for it–is really just proactively and intelligently taking away one more thing you could lose which would make you miserable. It’s a misstatement to say that a big element of Buddhism is getting rid of everything you love, but it’s not fully wrong either. Most monastic traditions are like that. Certainly Christianity is. Or was, in any event, and still is in some places.