TV Addiction

You cannot examine your own behaviors impartially. The fog of bias is far too thick to ever dissipate. There are countless studies to back this up, I'm sure, but I think any reasonable adult would find personal experience enough of a dataset to prove the point. 

It's especially difficult to accurately judge how much time you spend doing things. Time being an elusive force (see previous posts) withstanding, I find it impossible to line up my expectations with realities on this front. With nothing is this more true than with the temporal void that is TV. 

TV is so addictive. When on, it's this glowing orb of bright light and shifting colors that your eyes instinctively gravitate towards. I catch myself fixated on the screen when my dad watches in the kitchen like my cats on a bird flying by. I'll walk into the room and, before I know it, I'm watching a pharmaceutical drug ad or those incessant, sarcastic, self-righteous CNN anchors supposedly "reporting" the "news." It's like Gollum with the Ring. 

And when the TV is off, it's dark and foreboding, just waiting for you to bring it to life, to open the endless portal. When I get into the habit of watching TV, which for me can happen from literally one sitting, it's almost like it beckons me. 

TV addiction used to be a major talking point in culture. It was the tool degrading society, ruining the children. The great evil. David Foster Wallace talked about this many times, including his own addiction to it. (That interview I linked, by the way, is fantastic. I listened to it with my mom while driving through Arkansas. Worth the full listen.) Infinite Jest rides heavily on the topic of addictive entertainment, among other things. Don DeLillo writes in the same vein. 

Now, with smartphones, TV seems relatively benign. Nobody thinks of it as the menace it was in the 90s. A stationary bulk can't really compete with the ubiquitous handheld. But I think it's just been repackaged into a different form. We're basically watching TV on our laptops and phones, but it's more interactive and has more options. Reading Nature on a screen is one thing, but how much more time are we spending on TV derivatives (YouTube, TikTok) if we're being honest. I realize I feel the same infuriating, frightening beckon from my phone as I do the TV. I think we understate the role TV has as the granddaddy of our digital crisis, and we overlook the dangers it still poses today.

 

When I succumb to the pressure and watch, I enter a time capsule that takes focused effort to escape. And when I exit, I have no conception of how much time I was in. Thirty minutes is the same as two hours in there. Life slips away unconsciously. It scares me. 

The habit is so easy to make and so, so hard to break. Screens are constantly everywhere, and we know they're made to addict us. And, at least for me, TV is like any other addiction; it just ends up making me feel bad in the end.

Foucault and Insanity

It takes considerable effort to read Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. A friend and I have been working through it since summertime. We're a bit over halfway done as of now.  

 

The writing is incredibly complex, for one. Each sentence is structurally creativity, rife with references to other ideas and sophisticated vocabulary. The sheer quantity of scholarly research needed to write this book is almost unimaginable; obscure citations range from 18th century German doctors, priests in post-Enlightenment Paris, even ancient Latin sources. How he organized and collected this information is beyond me.  

 

The content itself is a dive into Europe's evolving relationship with insanity after the Enlightenment (approx. 17th century). The way Foucault approaches historiography adds another dimension to the book. He circles an argument with a wide arc before rushing to the core, like water down a drain. So at first you're bombarded with diverse snippets of source material that builds to the main point. It's inverse to conventional argument design (thesis then evidence), and it requires focus even when you don't really know the significance of what you're reading.

 

The overarching story Foucault is trying to tell, from what I understand so far, is that of the insurmountable conflict between logic and insanity. After the Scientific Revolution, madness came to be seen as an inexplicable phenomenon in direct contradiction to the methodical, precise, deducible nature of the world. On one hand, it was seen as the externalization of internal urges and spirits, but on the other an unnatural entity, for nature is logical and ordered, while the paradigms of madness, "melancholia," "mania," "hysteria," and "hypochondria," were not so. An aberration. 

 

The reaction to these insane realities that should not, could not, exist alongside the contemporary worldview, was distrust and fear. Gone were the days when madmen were an accepted part of life, a common sighting in urban centers, a regular part of the breadth of humanity. Now, these conditions threatened the understanding of a rational world. They needed to be removed. Placed out of sight out of mind. Thus, the creation of asylums.  

 

The crime of insanity became moral. The depraved existence of madmen, corrupted and vulnerable individuals, defied the modern God, the laws of science. For they are illogical, irrational. And the world is apparently not so. 

 

It's clear that this is the origin of the present mass prison system in the U.S. We use the same rationale today, and we continue to view mental illness as a nonconformity fundamentally criminal. We have yet to break from this mindset. Just look at the statistics; our jails basically function as wards for mental health patients. I could only find older data, but numbers suggest something from 15-75% of all prisoners have mental health issues.

 

I think this book shows how fragile our moral and intellectual foundations are, which seem to come from a place of arrogance. This negative outgrowth of the Enlightenment is often ignored, but it is real. The broad disillusionment increasingly common among all social strata must be a manifestation of this. We think we know how things work, and when something doesn't fit into our established framework, we feel threatened, compelled to remove it from sight. It's unsustainable. It's actually a tragedy for everyone involved. Rigidity makes the world a more bland, incomplete place. We have the same approach towards many things that don't fit neatly into our quantifiable structures, like spirituality and drugs. If we really wanted truth, we would be more open-minded.

The Arrow of Time

There's this term, "The Arrow of Time," that refers to the way time is unidirectional, always pointed to future from past. This simple fact is maybe the defining trait of life itself. So we wonder, quite naturally, if it could be different. Whether the nature of the arrow is necessarily fixed. 

 

I've been reading a book about the concept called From Eternity to Here by a Caltech physicist named Sean Carroll (he actually was one of my friend's professors). His writing is dense and hard to follow at times, unsurprisingly, but it's made me think of time in a different way; as a dimension, a coordinate in 4-D spacetime. That in itself is challenging enough to conceptualize, much less moving on to understand singularities or closed timelike curves. 

 

One insight that has especially stood out is how we orient ourselves in time. Carroll says we use the Big Bang to create temporal asymmetry the way we use Earth to do the same for space. Out in dark matter, all directions are symmetrical, equally filled with nothing. On Earth we recognize up and down because the planet is our reference point. The Big Bang serves as a similar reference point for time, clarifying the distinction between the low entropy past and higher entropy future.

 

I found Tenet, the newest Christopher Nolan movie, to be no help at all in this mindbending exploration. The concepts and budget he toyed with made for cool scenes but the logic, lost in an opaque, convoluted storyline, the mumbling dialogue, the total intentional confusion injected into the soul of the entire project, made for a personally unfruitful watch. I also found it neck-deep in the worst of action movie tropes; one man responsible for stopping the end of the world, he must choose between saving everything or saving his love, a doe-eyed attractive woman who lacks any defining trait besides those innocent and vulnerable optics. It somehow managed to not make any sense and be numbingly predictable at the same time. I do like Nolan's other movies, though. 

 

I'm not sure where all this thinking about time and reality has left me. I think it might be limited as just a mental exercise, a stirring not disruptive or imminent enough to spill over the levee separating daily life from the lake of my thoughts. Which is fine. I don't expect every endeavor to bear juicy revelations that turn my world.

 

Nevertheless, time ceaselessly marches on. The only thing to do is embrace it. I can be grateful for the good, like my new job, and thankful for what once was so, like Playboi Carti's vibe. I don't think any other response is appropriate.

 

 

The Civil War

As we reel from a traumatic, tumultuous year in American history, I find myself wondering, in accordance with millions of others, how it is we reached this point. What led us here. What is this, this incompetence and polarity and gridlock, a manifestation of. Is there reason for hope, pragmatically speaking. And I've found, in my brief and superficial explorations, that the answers lie in history. Specifically, the Civil War. 

 

The connection crystalized in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine by David Blight, a Yale Professor of American History, called "The Reconstruction of America." He reminds us of the result of the unfinished Reconstruction, the curtailed rebuilding and integration of the South after the Civil War; the issues that caused the war itself, the driving forces of our great schism, were never resolved. These questions, in particular:

"Who is an American? What is equality, and how should it be established and protected? What is the proper relationship between states and the federal government? What is the role of government in shaping society? Is federalism a strength or weakness?"

It's clear that these are the exact disagreements plaguing us today. How little rhetoric has fundamentally changed in 150 years; how distant we remain from solving these hard questions. They stubbornly persist at the core of our national dysfunction, generation after generation.

Realizing the conserved nature of our foundational American debates has given me angst and idealism. Frustration at the failure to implement lasting reform during Reconstruction that could have ended, or at least mitigated, the extreme geographic disparities in governance and social structures that persevere today, the squandering of a raw, leveled slate by our worst president, Andrew Johnson, that could have birthed a more united nation. Optimism at the potential for improvement that we've embraced, time and time again, despite resistance and the lingering of root questions, that have raised millions from destitution, oppression, poverty and hopelessness. We somehow live in a reality of both, a confusing history we're still reckoning with, still unsure of.

One thing I do know is that I need to learn more about both the run-up to the war and the aftermath. Therein, I think, are the keys to unlocking our doors to a brighter future. Better understanding the ramifications of decisions made then, and how we can move towards ending our monumental disputes, should be an enlightening process.