Warning: This post is deeper and longer than most of what I’ve posted in the past, but I believe this to be one of the most important posts that I have written. Well maybe not longer but certainly more wordy…
Ok so when I started writing this, there wasn’t going to be a part 2. It’s not a series or anything along those lines. The first attempt was going to be deep, inspiring, awesome and thought provoking, but then ADD kicked in and I started writing all kinds of stuff that wasn’t related to anything. This resulted in the whole post being run off into a ditch and instead of correcting the post, I decided that it would be better to just rewrite the thing instead of fixing it. It just bees that way sometimes... So this is the more focused rewrite after the ADD meds started kicking in. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t intend for there to be a part 3 but then again I never intended for their to be a part two…
What I am going to say here in this post may be a kick in the shorts to some folks but I believe that it needs to be said. I realize that this will likely have the same affect as a fart in church; some will appreciate it but most will prolly wrinkle their nose in offense and turn away. The unfortunate part is that the folks who will appreciate what I have to say already know these things and the folks that will turn away are most likely the ones that need to hear what I have to say. The goal with this post is to reach the open minded and unoffendable amongst us; the people who didn’t realize that this was a thing but who are willing to having their mind changed.
If you’re not familiar with my “fart in church” analogy then the song “The Big One” by Confederate Railroad does a pretty good job of mansplaining. If you’re upset that the band’s name has the word “Confederate” then you definitely need to read through the whole thing…
Before I get started, I just want to mention to the potentially offended and to the perpetually offended that I am just as guilty as everyone else in what I am writing here and so there is no need to inform me that I need to “get off my high horse” or some such thing. I’m riding on the same size horse, and in the same direction, as everyone else. Its just that I’ve started looking around while most everyone else seems to be scrolling through antisocial media and not noticing what is going on around us. I’m trying to tell those willing to listen that we took the wrong trail at some point and we need to do something different.
I use several examples in this essay and they’re from my world and the interests that I have. If these examples don’t fit then feel free to substitute your own interests and goals. So here it goes…
Our society has a dopamine problem… We are addicted to the good feelings of the dopamine release that we get from escaping the world around us. This escapism has many different sources but the most popular are sportsball, (anti)social media, the interwebz, “influencers”, and video games. We went from a nation of builders and creators to a nation of watchers in a very short period of time. We don’t go fishing, we watch people fish. We don’t teach or discipline our kids, we watch others discipline and teach their kids. We don’t go explore the world, we watch videos on YouTube of people exploring the world and then go buy mountains of explorer gear so that we can feel like we are explores. We watch crafters and artists on the interwebz instead of actually making things because the internets makes us feel like we can make things. We don’t train martial arts, we watch MMA and feel like we can fight. We don’t help the needy and the hurt, but we “support” the groups that make us “aware” of those who need help with a “like” because antisocial media makes us feel like we are helping. We don’t play sports, but watch them with others and feel like we are athletes and part of the team. We don’t actually live our lives, but we feel like we do. That is the key part of all of this. We “feel” like we are doing the things that we want to do instead of actually doing them.
Ok so what is dopamine and why does it matter to the discussion? Its a hormone, a chemical, that is released in our brain when we do something rewarding. Its what makes us feel good and motivated to do something more after we’ve done something new or exciting or after we’ve accomplished a goal.
The interesting part of this is that we have to do something first in order to get the initial dopamine release. Back in the day, we would get that dopamine fix from actually doing things; creating art, exploring, learning something new, building something cool, jumping out of airplanes, swimming with sharks, friends punching and choking each other, creating insightful posts on substack… but our modern technologies have made the actual doing part required for a dopamine release pretty much irrelevant. The algorithms, which are nothing more than really complicated math equations, that operate the (anti)social media platforms were designed using inputs from psychologists. These algorithms know more about you than you know about you. The result is that when you interact with (anti)social media, video games, and all of the interwebz, you are given results which are tailored specifically to you in order to attract your attention in the precise way that will hook you. It can be very hard to get away once you’ve been hooked. It’s how google, facebook, instagram, and the others work. The results are tailored to your interests, mood, and personality based on what you search for and how you interact with those sites. Your information is then sold to advertisers who will target you based on what the algorithm has learned about you. Ever wonder why you can search for one thing and then other multiple websites will start showing you ads based on what you searched for in other places? It’s because of the google algorithm and because google software is used to run many of the programs that E-commerce businesses use.
Now these things in and of themselves are not a bad thing. We need to have a level of entertainment in our lives. Our society is complex and operates in ways that are not natural, but there isn’t much that we can do about that unless society collapses and becomes something else. So we need to escape to a place where our mind and bodies can process the stresses of the day. The problem is not that we escape, but how and to what degree we escape. We Americans live in an escapist bubble that has been designed created to keep us from living our lives and connecting with others.
We can watch gun related videos on youtube and interact on gun forums or we can buy a gun, pay for training classes, practice, and go shoot in competitive shooting matches. You can enter your own clever examples into the previous sentence and the result is the same. Our mind doesn’t know the difference between actually doing a thing and just watching the thing. The release of dopamine is the same whether we are watching something on youtube or actually winning at the same thing in for real life. In fact, the dopamine release is more intense when watching on youtube and engaging in (anti)social media because those platforms were designed and created to attract us at the most foundational level of our being and because those platforms remove the element of risk. These are guaranteed wins. You can watch something that was tailored to your interests and have everything you thought confirmed. There is no challenge or risk when you engage in this way.
The difference between watching and doing in this sense is reality. Reality contains the high probability of failure even after we put in all of the effort that we can physically and emotionally muster. In reality, you can devote your whole life to a cause or to a project and still fail miserably. That’s not a bad thing, but it is painful and we have been allowed to believe that feeling pain and discomfort is bad and should be avoided at all costs. There is no growth without feeling physical and emotional pain and discomfort. Its just the way it is.
Pain and discomfort offer us a choice when we get knocked down. We can either quit oorrr we can acknowledge that we sucked at whatever we were trying to do, get up, start over, and keep going. And then fail again… Wash, rinse, repeat… That choice is controlled by your determination and will to succeed and just like a muscle, your will needs to be exercised through the choice to quit or keep going. The only way that happens is by engaging in something difficult and uncomfortable. With our modern escapist techniques and technologies, people are made to feel as though they can do the thing that they want to do, but without the possibility of failure. The result is that we miss out on the path that we have to walk in order to actually do the things that we want to. Accomplishments in life require work and failure. We can’t actually do anything worth talking about unless we are willing to work and are willing to fail, get back up, and start working at succeeding again. That requires determination and it requires experience, the two things that we are robbed of when we escape.
By escaping off into the matrix, we are neglecting to live our lives and we are neglecting those around us. We aren’t engaging the abilities that we have and we’re not learning the lessons which work teaches. When we’re escaping, we are guaranteed the success needed for a dopamine release without the risk and work associated from the actual trials of life. Dudes are super duper blackbelt ninja samurai masters when they’re commenting on a MMA post, but will not get on the mats to see what they’re made, because its hard and because there is a guarantee of failure. Men can become Airborne-Green Beret-Delta Force-Range-Seals when they play video games and watch the youtubes but won’t join the military and risk the chance that they could fail or be harmed. This escape keeps us from having to choose between quitting and getting back up when we get knocked down. We don’t have to face the actual situations where we have to choose between cowardice and courage when we can get the same feeling of success from a video game. But time keeps ticking by.
Ok… so what’s the big deal… well do this next time you go out to eat at a restaurant. Look around at the other people. How many are conversing and how many are looking at their phones. In order to do that, you will have to put your phone down first. In fact, just leave it in the car. People aren’t engaging in their lives or with each other, they are engaging with a device that makes them feel like they are engaging with life but the world keeps turning and time keeps ticking by.
Here is why that matters. Not only are our personal connections damaged but far more importantly, our autonomy and our ability to think critically is deeply damaged. This then renders our ability to make independent choices much more difficult. We start believing things that we have no justification for believing or buying things that we normally wouldn’t buy or voting for people who we would never consider for political office. Your emotional response to that last point may indicate the level of influence that you have allowed over your emotional thinking. When we are escaping off, we open the most easily influenced part of our minds to having our thinking and decision making processes controlled by those who seek only to benefit, whether that be financially, politically, or spiritually.
In short, we stop looking for truth in our actions and decisions because our programming has taught us to stop looking for truth and to believe that there is no truth other than what we “feel” the truth to be, not realizing that our feelings are being manipulated in order to make us think and believe in a certain way. We believe that the statement “there is no truth” to be a true statement… Our emotions are toyed with and we become manipulated and we don’t even realize what has happened. In fact, we feel good about what we have done and what we feel and so we keep doing it. This results in going further and further down the rabbit hole of feelings until we are owned by whoever is manipulating us. Want a fictional story about what this looks like from the outside and where this level of manipulation leads? Then go read “Brave New World” by Aldus Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell. Oh… you don’t read? Well start reading by getting a copy of Brave New World and 1984. After reading 1984, read Animal Farm from George Orwell.
I realized something while writing, or typing as it were, that last paragraph. The difference in reading about a subject and watching a video… The difference between reading a book and watching social media about a subject is that different parts of your brain are activated when you read and this just isn’t the case when you watch a video, at least not to the same degree. Reading engages the critical thinking part of our brains and brings things into relationships and questions in a way that an algorithmically selected video or story cannot.
If I read a book, then my mind has to do hard work. It has to visualize the concept that the author is describing. In order to do that, it has to have something to work with and it draws in concepts from my other learnings and experiences in order to build the visualizations in my mind. When the abstractions from the book don’t fit with what our experience tells us, a question arises which makes us think more or want to look for answers. When we decide to look for the answers based on truth instead of feelings then we learn something worth learning.
A book takes something abstract and makes it more definitive by adding to other abstractions and by filling in missing pieces from past learnings. I have then learned something new and even if I forget the facts about what I have read, I have still exercised the critical thinking and reasoning part of my brain. Videos don’t do that. Videos provide everything for us in a crafted sort of way so that all we have to do is watch and take in what is being fed to us, often without any effort on our part. We don’t interact, we can’t ask for clarification. It’s how advertising and propaganda work.
So what… why does this matter? It matters because people don’t read anymore. We get our theology, worldviews, ideological propaganda news, and self identities from something that is crafted to manipulate us into feeling a certain way and not through making us think, experience, and reason. Start reading and be critical about what you are reading. Challenge your views and try to get to the foundation of your beliefs. You do this by starting to ask the question “why”. A LOT. Reading will help you with asking that question…
So here is the main point of all these words… Trouble will eventually come. By trouble I don’t mean some end of the world conspiracy theory scenario, though I suppose it could (even though conspiracy theory is spread when people stop thinking critically and react emotionally based on ideology, thereby opening themselves up to manipulation by those who seek to exploit people for their own political ends. A good example are atheists and Marxists, who are typically atheists… just sayin’). Trouble and hard times always come and how we use our free time in life is how we become trained to react to the hard times. If we constantly escape off into fantasy, addiction, or ideology we are making ourselves feel good instead of engaging in the hard side of life and we won’t be mentally prepared to handle the adversity of life.
Here are two examples of what I’m talking about.
First was a nuclear missile launch warning broadcast in Hawaii back in 2018. It was a false alarm but people panicked, and rightly so. The panic was natural and understandable. However, at the same time that missile launch warning happened, porn hub’s traffic went thorough the roof. Hawaiians were going to a porn site in order to make themselves feel good instead of engaging the scary thought that they were under attack and may be harmed.
Those folks had trained themselves to turn to porn instead of engaging in the scary and difficult task of facing the potential attack. Now… if your response is to say something along the lines of “well there would be no survival from a nuclear attack so you might as well do what you want to do” then I’m going to tell you that that attitude and thought process is defeatist and escapist. You have trained yourself to not even make the attempt at self preservation. An attack is an attack. It could be nuclear missiles or a violent person attacking you but the mental response is the same. It’s a response to fear and our response to fear can be trained to operate to benefit our survival or the response can be neglected so that when stress does happen, we tap out and go make ourselves feel good instead of facing or enduring the stress. It’s why the military trains soldiers to fight when they are facing the most intense emotions that humans can feel. Soldiers in combat are operating on training and are able to think while under extreme stress, which they have been trained to do though stress inoculation and not through emotional conditioning.
The second example comes from people’s response during the coronapocalypse and I have two examples here.
The first example is the panic that ensued when everything was going down. People were buying tons of toilet paper because of a respiratory disease… Toilet paper… For a respiratory disease… Unless I missed something, toilet paper is typically used at the other end of the body from where respiratory issues happen. Why were people panicking buying toilet paper for a respiratory illness? Well… because folks saw other people buying toilet paper and then not knowing any better, and not having trained their ability to think critically they reacted just like others around them, they followed what everyone else was doing. Then there became a shortage, which increased the panic.
The second example in this has to do with food. I would go walk around the grocery store and watch what people were doing and what they were buying. I’m a people watcher. There is a lot to learn about we humans by just sitting and watching folks go about their lives. People were stocking up and preparing for the worse… by purchasing ramen noodles, cokes1, little debbie cakes, a metric buttload of toilet paper, and a couple bottles of water… The news media and (anti)social media talked about the shortages, but the stores that I went to had plenty of food that our bodies actually need and foods that are actually beneficial during an emergency situation. However, the cookie, cokes, chips, and junk food isles were wiped out. People were not buying supplies to survive a tough time, they were buying comfort foods in order to make themselves feel better. Now I will admit that this example may be a local thing and that what you experienced may have been different but this is what I saw where I live. There was plenty of high protein and nutrient dense foods but very little in the way of foods with high sugar and carbohydrate contents. Folks couldn’t think rationally about what was going on because they were acting on emotion only.
Our minds have three modes of operation; emotionally, on autopilot, or rationally. They can only operate in one mode at a time and which mode that our mind selects is dependent on the situation. The thing about that though is that we need all three modes in order to navigate the world. Emotions are our feelings and our feelings are driven by beliefs. We come to our beliefs through thinking about the world rationally. The autopilot part of our mind is where our flight or fight response resides and is programmed through emotions and beliefs. We can train our flight or flight response by engaging in things that we are afraid of, by facing our fears and choosing to overcome them. All three parts are needed and all three are trainable. When we escape off instead of training, we train ourselves to mentally and emotionally escape when times get tough instead of facing the fears, discomfort, and trouble. When we become stressed, we won’t even realize that we are doing it. It just happens.
We’ve all heard it said that we “rise to the occasion” but this is false. People do not rise to the occasion when faced with adversity, we sink to the level of our training and experience. When we are stressed, our mind automatically switches on autopilot mode and if there is no programming to tell the autopilot what to do, then our minds next move is to the emotional mode of operation. This mode is going to try and protect the mind by going to whatever it has been programmed to make itself feel good. The mind doesn’t go to rational thought until after the stress has been resolved or you are trained to be able to think while under stress. It is at that point that we need to stop and think critically about whatever caused the stress so that we can understand the roots and causes of the stress. This is how we learn to respond better next time the situation happens. This is how the autopilot is trained, but if we escape instead of doing the hard work of thinking and facing our fears, then the next time trouble comes, we will just escape off into whatever makes us feel good.
Conclusion
I’ve kinda taken this in a bit of a dark direction but the same is true for the things that we enjoy and the things that are positive in our lives. We miss out on so much of our lives because we get the “feeling” that we are living our lives. Living life is hard. It requires us to fail and to get back up and keep going. We get stuck thinking that we need more stuff in order to do things we want to do. We then get bound up in debit or work a stupid amount of hours so that we can have the money to buy the stuff that we thought we needed or can’t afford to do what we wanted to do because of the debit that we incurred because we thought we needed the stuff. This results in us not having the money or the time to do what we wanted to do in the first place. We feel that we have knowledge and wisdom about something of interest after watching a video or seeing a meme from people who appear to be learned and wise. Instead of doing the hard work of studying on our own and challenging our thinking.
Unplug from the matrix. Get outside and go do something. Go to a park and walk. Pick up a book and read something. Go to a public event and talk to people. Go to church and hug on someone that needs to be loved on. Our lives are meant to lived and experienced and not just “felt”. Get out and go live your life.
This has been a longer and deeper post than what I originally intended but I believe that these are things that needed to be said. I was going to tie this into escapism with in the church but after starting in that direction, I came to realize that this is a topic all on its own and will be something that I will write in the future. So I guess there may be a part 3 after all…
If you’ve made it to the end then I would like to say thank you. I truly appreciate you spending a part of your most precious resource with me, your time. Like and comment if you wish. Please subscribe if you’re interested in what I write. There is no cost to subscribe and you can leave whenever you want. I hope that you have a blessed day.
Fair Winds and Following Seas,
Nate
I’m from the south and I’m old school. An important, though fading idiom in the Southern Parlance is that every soft drink is a coke.
Very good points, I spent most of last Friday at the Everglades national park, in the shark valley area. While I did use my phone to snap some pictures, I noticed a lot of people looking at the iPhones and not the nature that I figured we all had come there to see.