by Kirk Schneider at Aeon:What if I told you – like the eerily moving Control Voice in the 1960s TV show The Outer Limits – that ‘you are about to participate in a Great Adventure’, that ‘you are about to experience the awe and mystery’ of the Universe on this journey. And what if I told you that you will witness many strange and marvellous beings, creatures and sensations along your path; that you will experience new colours, shapes and textures – make contact with fields and trees, and with people from a wealth of backgrounds; invigorating games, vehicles, animals, the touch of mud and flesh, sweet and savoury foods, new companions, the experience of love and friendship, of anger and hurt, of aloneness and contemplation. And what if I said that all these experiences will lead to fresh ideas, creations and relationships… to a personality with choice and possibility as well as limits and apprehensions; and that these limits and apprehensions will point to a vast background of sky and consciousness, a background that will give you the feeling of being a part of something much greater than yourself?
And what if I told you that you will be able to feel as I did as a 12-year-old lying on a beach near New York City in 1968 – outstretched on the sand with the wind in my hair and the waves lapping at my heels, fresh out of the water where I bodysurfed and wave-hopped to my heart’s content. It was a scene where my dad and I, and hordes of other beachgoers, gathered around transistor radios listening to tunes like ‘Time of the Season’ by the Zombies.
And what if I told you, further, that you will be able to hold Great Conversations on this adventure, like I did with my dad on that beach, that you will have the chance to do something creative, to love deeply, and to contribute to the Great Chain of Being starting from your earliest ancestors and ending with you and your successors. And, finally, what if I told you that you will be given an essentially blank canvas on which to ‘paint’ or ‘write’ your own story, and that you can do this over decades, with all the resources that a human mind and heart can offer. Would you want to go? Would you be willing to scrape together all you could to be a part of this journey? Or would you fritter it away, engage in idle chatter, trudge through mechanised routines, and dabble in surface relationships?
Today, thanks mostly to our technologies, people are taking the second path through life much of the time. Today, we are rapidly becoming ‘tech-vexed’ – my word for the gradual yet relentless seduction of computerised life. The COVID-19 pandemic simply accelerated a trend: many of us are now more intimately connected to smartphones than to nonmediated relationships with people. The net result of this insular life is that relationships with ourselves and others take on a new hue. First, we live in a world that is more predictable than the ‘raw’ world of face-to-face relationships. Second, we live in a world that, at least on the surface, is more controllable than the latter; and third, we live in a world that, for many, is far less consequential than a live – physically and emotionally demanding – relationship.
What are the effects of such a scenario? Here are several. It is much easier, at least ostensibly, to live in isolation from other people. It is much easier to develop a relationship to a leader, a party, a doctrine – or, for that matter, a television show (or set of shows) – and a passive-receptive lifestyle than it is to live in direct contact with people, with the exchange of ideas, with the diversity of perspectives, with wonder and surprise, and with unsettling yet potentially edifying truths about life.
Moreover, it becomes easier to live virtually – through games, shows, video personalities, five-inch (and sometimes 75-inch!) screens – than it is to live directly, without barriers, without prearrangements, without games or physical and psychological distance. The virtual life also makes it easier to achieve illusions of grandeur – like the boy or girl with the most views on their Instagram photos, or the person with the most hits for a clever Tweet. The power in these situations is enormous, and yet it is so often about trivial matters – unless disinformation spurs an attempt to take over the US government as occurred on 6 January 2021, or just spreads racist hate.
The upshot of device-mediated encounters is that they may be benign in single instances but collectively they are alarming. The larger question is where we are headed with such encounters. How do they impact our capacity to love, to be present to one another, to sort out what deeply matters about oneself and life? What impact do they have on human capabilities in general, but in particular those that give us a sense of integrity and of whole-bodied experiences of life?
Take the question of authenticity for example. Is an online relationship as honest, open and palpable as a face-to-face relationship? Does the absence of taste, touch, smell – or blood, sweat and tears for that matter – make a difference in the quality of what is experienced? Is immersion in a video game or chat room the same as playing a game on a wet grassy field, or congregating with an in-person group? Is the engagement of artificial intelligence and devices that operate by algorithms to create books, articles, works of art equivalent to people inspiring those products? Is anxiety and vulnerability necessary to deeply move people, or can machines replicate that effect through ‘self’-programming? These are vital questions – imperative questions – that cannot, in my view, be substantively answered by surveys or quantitative studies. They must be searched out in the arts and in careful descriptions of people’s living, breathing experiences.
In the film The Whale (2022), a 600-pound teacher of literature (played by Brendan Fraser) asks those he’s close to – including his daughter, his nurse, a jittery evangelist, and his literature class – to throw their daily routines aside for a moment, and just be honest. Be honest with themselves, with him and with society; and try to live life with full acknowledgment of the fragile, momentary flicker that it spans. And if you live that way, he intimates, you will discover a fresh new world, an energising new world, where people can really see and hear each other, and priorities tend to align with hearts. The irony of course is that, as he realised how profoundly he had squandered his own possibilities for living, and quite literally made a career of hiding, he was speaking to himself. To thine own self be true, yes?
