“A Few Thoughts on Current Events.”
I wake up every day around two or three in the afternoon, make a cup of coffee and turn on the news, just waiting for the day when it finally happens, the day that something finally snaps, and I am listening to Sheppard Smith breathlessly trying to describe shaky video of a mob of 500,000 or 800,000 pissed off taxpayers that has invaded Washington and are lining every street in D.C., armed to the teeth, and erecting scaffolding on the National Mall.
Actually, that’s not how I think it is going to go, but I promise you… what can not go on, will NOT go on.
Some language NSFW.
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While I disagree with the “everything is a sickness” approach to problems, the article is otherwise spot on.
In one experiment, participants were left alone in a room for up to 15 minutes. When asked whether they liked the alone time, over half reported disliking it.
In subsequent studies, participants were given an electric shock, and then asked if they would pay money to avoid being shocked again. Not surprisingly, most said they would trade money to avoid pain. However, when these same people were left alone in a room for 15 minutes, nearly half chose to self-administer an electric shock rather than sit alone with their thoughts.
You read that right.
Voluntarily.
Shocking.
(Which is so not punny.)
Think about what this means. Just being is so painful that we are willing to hurt ourselves to avoid it.
And this is perhaps the saddest truth of all. I am created in the image and likeness of God, yet somehow that isn’t good enough for me. So I fill my Facebook feed and my calendar with self-important busyness to avoid just being. In the process, I not only miss out on the peace and beauty that lies within myself, but I also miss seeing that same beauty in others, because my manufactured urgency has covered it up with anxiety and worry.
Guess I’m weird. I am perfectly happy to be alone with myself, wherever I am, but especially at home. Actually… always was that way. I hate crowds, and even beloved company is exhausting after a while. As for the shock… get enough of that when I contemplate the news (seldom), so don’t need the electricity kind.
Problem with this “study,” however, is that the set up is artificial and the choices limited. Doesn’t really tell you what people choose in real life, ncessarily. I don’t trust most “studies” in the least. And I don’t much care what other people choose anyway. 🙂
I don’t oftern agree with others but have to say MamaLiberty’s post could have been mine, exactly. Yes!
The paragraph below annoyed me.
From “Busy is a Sickness:”
“In America, we are defined by what we do. Our careers. What we produce. … The implication is that if I am not busy doing something, I am somehow less than. Not worthy. Or at least worth less than those who are producing something.”
Well, you are what you do, and your value as a human being is determined by what you produce. It is not just doing something, however. Anyone in a public sector job is busy doing something, but they produce nothing of value, and whatever wealth they accumulate was stolen from those who do produce something of value.
[Just being is so painful that we are willing to hurt ourselves to avoid it.]
It could include people who initially decided they’d pay to avoid shocks, working up the courage to see if they could stand it again.
Studies about human beings almost all have an axe to grind. It’s not exactly hard science, is it? (Which is about the same thing as saying it’s not science at all.)
Studies about human beings are also one of the primary justifications for legislation to “fix” us. Remember the BS studies about poverty? Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” depended on them, and those fuckers “fixed” the black family but good.
On the thoughts about current events,
“I see it every night in my car, people that are utterly clueless and completely oblivious to this shit, and can’t bring themselves to give a fuck…”
I don’t entirely agree with this one. He is concluding people don’t care because they don’t write their congresscritters angry letters, or get out on the streets. If you find X does not pay any attention to you, do you spend all your time trying to interact with X? No, you move on and do something better with your time.
It’s not that people don’t care; it’s that they have learned that the ruling class does what it wants, and that the story they were told by their high school civics teacher was a lie. It’s that they are waiting for the other shoe to fall. Everybody with half a brain knows things can’t go on as they are. But what to do about it? Hunker down and get ready, seems to me.
Didn’t actually read the article (“Because he’s busy,” snarked the inner voice) but the sensation of discomfort at the mere thought of being left alone with nothing to distract my thoughts is familiar from a former life.
” I … miss out on the peace and beauty that lies within myself”
There’s a self-pleasing assumption embedded in that phrase. Most of us who live in the city and move with its currents don’t have a lot of inner peace and beauty to miss. We stay busy because we’ve been conditioned to do so, even eating and sleeping and breeding on a rigid schedule, and so naturally that’s what we’ve attuned our whole selves to. It doesn’t leave much room for what used to be called self-actualization, so in terms of ‘inner peace and beauty’ most of us don’t have very much there there.
Personally I don’t think it’s a sickness. Like madness in a soldier, it’s a survival adaptation.
I’m not implying that people don’t overfill their lives with tasks they needn’t spend time on…
I wish there was a way to edit responses. I always think of something else after I hit the “Submit Comment” button.
This post has inspired my latest rant. 🙂
Do You Smile Every Day?
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/?p=7031
Love that one, ML! Will blog it as its own item with a link to your original!
From the Taxicab Depressions:
“Obama has granted amnesty to some five million illegal immigrants via executive order. There’s just one problem with that; HE CAN’T DO THAT. He has said so himself, in public, on camera, more than twenty times. But he just did it, in a naked and blatant display of unconstitutional criminality, and resistance to this act seems almost nonexistent in Washington.”
Yet, that is one of the few things a president can “legally”/constitutionally do. And, until someone passes a Constitutional amendment, “immigration” control isn’t constitutional, anyway. Inconvenient for those who worship the Constitution and wring their hands over “those people” moving around without Big(gest) Government permission.
Seems he’s just a pissy “conservative” who needs to mind his own business.
[Inconvenient for those who worship the Constitution]
Conservatives are just as good at cherry-picking the Constitution, as everybody else is. Kinda calls into question the utility of Constitutions, doesn’t it?
Ditto what MamaLiberty said.
I used to work as a hospital PBX (telephone operator), and one of the other operators couldn’t stand silence. Fortunately I only had to work with her for 30 minutes during shift change. But that 30 minutes was a miserable time for me.
She talked, talked, talked. Even if I swiveled my chair around where my back was to her she continued talking. Nothing would stop her.
There was also a male operator who wasn’t as bad, but he could be annoying also. One night I was working with him, and was reading a book in between calls. Out of the blue he asked me if “I liked to watch tennis on TV?” I looked at him, and in an exasperated voice said his name. He shut up for the rest of the shift.
Back when I was studying meditation, I remember one of my instructors saying “People spend 98% of their time, money, and energy trying to distract themselves FROM themselves.”
I wonder how much this ties back into that “Poverty vs. Poverty” thing? I know I’ve watched people who were stressing out over whether they could afford their next meal, yet who somehow have enough for netflix or drinks at the bar.
I know my sis-in-law is an extreme case, but she goes a little nuts just being alone for a few minutes. Even in her own house, with an internet connection and walls full of books and DVDs, she goes completely stir-crazy. We’re opposites in that I can’t stand noise and people, even if it’s people I get along with. When they’re visiting I often have to step away for several minutes just to clear the noise out of my head. She can’t understand how I can go to my farm and be by myself for several hours. I can’t understand how she can’t understand.
And when I lost my voice for a long time, I learned exactly how terrified people are of silence. It’s amazing, really.