Craving Peace
I recently saw two posts on my social media feed. One was a laundry list of “F*** ____” that covered most of the Current Things that the righteous proclaim as existential threats to the planet. Another was a photo of an isolated cabin with a lament about craving serenity or peace or tranquility or quiet or some equivalent.
All around me, I see people stressed out by the state of the nation and the world, many of them in a perpetual doom-spiral and latched onto their televisions or devices in pursuit of the latest Current Thing to trigger more outrage.
An Internet friend and fellow blogger recently offered a recollection of a time when people spent much of their time in partial disconnect from the world’s troubles, when kids would disappear from parental oversight for hours on end and without any outside connection beyond their circles of friends, and when adults would mentally check out, on a park bench with a book, unchallenged by suspicious and self-righteous Karens.
Living in perpetual rage and misery is not healthy. It is addictive, however. Righteous indignation triggers certain pleasure centers in the brain, making us subconsciously more likely to seek more of it. This, I feel safe in surmising, is at the heart of our present-day victim culture, no matter that many self-proclaimed victims live lifestyles of far greater ease and comfort than most of the world’s eight billion.
While activism and making your opinion known do matter, they only matter to a degree. In a sea of tens of millions doing the same thing, you contribute nothing extra by doing so perpetually. Nor does doom-scrolling. I’ve pointed out, repeatedly, that there is no prize for being first with an opinion. Likewise, spending hours and hours looking for the next drip of new information in the moment it’s released is a colossal waste of your time and energy, and terrible for your mental health. While I hate the gatekeeper aspect of legacy media and I think there is value to the widely distributed sourcing of information today, I do look back on the time when you’d get news the next morning, after its reporters had time to gather, vet, confirm, and collate information, with a certain wistfulness.
The urgency to know NOW!!, even when there is very little real information available, does more harm than good. It leads us to voicing snap opinions based on partial and often incorrect information, and human nature motivates us to defend those snap opinions so that we don’t feel foolish in changing them.
We’d all be better off if we checked out of world-wide connection for parts of our days. There is zero down side 99.9999% of the time in doing so - our opinions are simply not that important that they can’t wait, and there will almost never be harm in delaying our knowledge of what’s going on in the world by a few hours. Likewise, our instant outrage does no one any good. Really, nobody cares how much you spit and curse and sky-scream, so “lighten up, Francis.”
My responses to the two posts I mentioned at the top of this piece are:
Your F-bombs change no minds, and only serve to diminish you in the eyes of those who don’t already agree with you.
Peace is easily found. Turn your phone off, grab a book and a glass of wine, and plop on your couch. Go for a walk without your phone. Work on a project, leaving your phone in another room. Mow your lawn. Do your laundry. Disconnect from the world for a bit. Anything that happens in the world while your phone is off will be unaffected your getting the information a couple hours later.
If you truly crave peace, grab a few hours of it. You certainly know how. If, on the other hand, your stress level spikes by disconnecting, then what you’re really craving is the dopamine hit from doom-scrolling. That’s a bad addiction to have, and the remedy starts with admitting you have it.
And if you truly crave dumping outrage on the internet, ask yourself, to what end? You aren’t going to wind hearts and minds, no matter how much you rationalize the reason for your venting. Today, I’m the bearer of bad news - you’re doing it, in most cases, to preen and virtue signal. We’re all guilty of it. Yes, there are times when the occasional expletive can emphasize rather than alienate, but they are rarer than we think, and emotional outrage is best used sparingly.
A bit more inner peace in all of us will pay huge dividends for our society.
BAILI! And the book to grab with your glass of wine is “Meditations”🤗
I do remember, with mixed feelings, those days when there was no such thing as the Internet or mobile phones. There is definitely some benefit to the Internet in being able to do research and find information quickly and easily (though I always loved the card catalog at the library), but you are right - being connected ALL THE TIME, is not healthy for anyone.