Peddling emotions

I was listening to some kid at the theater tonight–I did finally go see the movie that may as well have been titled Thanos–and thinking he was nerdy.  Then I thought, well, he has lived his whole life surrounded by media, and has been undersocialized.  This is basically what being nerdy is.  A kid might be nerdy because he studies all the time, because plays video games all the time, or because he finds some other way to hide in his room, perhaps with a few people like him or herself.  But the lack of interacting, talking, going back and forth, learning how it all works: that is fundamental.

Then I thought about what I was doing there.  A movie theater is a good place for a nerd.  There are lots of feelings there, lots of emotions, lots of ways to live an ersatz life.

Then I got to thinking about how it is quite possible, in our world, to spend a majority of time feeling other people’s emotions, ones that are peddled to you.  I have long said I don’t want to die and realize I lived someone else’s life, but in important respects, if you consume media habitually, that is what you are doing.  When you come to die, when you look at how you spent your time, how you got your pleasures, how you got your equivalent, in many cases, of social interaction, it was vicariously, through either people playing roles, or pretending to be real on reality TV.

What IS a life spent watching TV or playing video games?  Is that life at all?  Is not killing time a sin of some sort?  If you spent the time staring at the wall, emotions would come up that were YOURS, no one elses.  Those emotions make you who you are, and not someone else.

But vast sums of money are made pushing emotions, pushing feelings.  “They are making a new Mission Impossible, and it looks like lots of ups and downs.  I can’t wait.”

Why would this movie be exciting?  Because you get lots of ups and downs.  They do deliver, in most cases.  This is not a lie or a false promise, EXCEPT that no movie can give you a life.

Obviously, I am a bit of a cinephile, but I view cinema as a way of ENHANCING my life experience.  I watch perhaps two movies a week when I am watching heavily.  I watch Jeopardy most nights, and allow myself to watch some of the documentaries on the Weather channel and sometimes American Ninja Warrior.  That’s it.  My normal day often includes no TV but Jeopardy, which I enjoy, even thought I am just not QUITE good enough to play on it.  I’m not good at pop culture, and current novels, and sometimes I just brain fade.  On the latest quiz I couldn’t remember Myanmar.  I don’t know why.

But all that as it may, consider the role ersatz experience plays in your life.  Do you sit still long enough, ever, to really know who you are, and to be able to observe your self as it expands and contracts, as it reacts to things and situations, and people?  Can you feel subtle qualities of sensation as they arise and stay with them?  This is what the Indians in the trees and plains and mountains did.  This is how you feel a landscape.  This is how you feel a place.  This is how you sense subtle changes.

That which is not used withers and dies.  We are exposed to vastly too much affect, such that our endogenous capacities seem to be weakened.  People complain they can’t feel anything.  This is most likely because they have felt too much, for too long, that had nothing to do with them at all.

Souls take nurturing too.  They require water and sunlight and fresh air.  At least, our relationship with our souls, our conscious relationship, does.

We all die.  This is sad, and it is happy.  Perhaps when it is my time, I will breathe a sigh of relief.  My last words might be “Fuck, that was hard.”  But I do think we all need to take care to live in our own bodies, to think our own thoughts, to feel what we feel, to allow what we feel, to learn to understand and regulate at its own level what we feel, and to find our own ways in life both intuitively and rationally.