John Wise

So, we’re out before the break of dawn, and Caroline is talking about a story she was reading regarding the placebo effect. In particular, she referenced how in a study about the efficacy of the antidepressant Paxil, the placebo was more successful. This leads us to talk about some of the people we know who suffer from depression, and that triggered memories of an article I read the evening before regarding Hannah Arendt and her writings about loneliness being a catalyst for accepting totalitarianism. Then, after making the leap from the placebo effect to totalitarianism, where do you go? To consumerism and choice, obviously.

The idea that loneliness has a connection to fascism was novel to me, but looking at our current political and social situation, it makes perfect sense. Who are the most dissatisfied among our population? The disenfranchised have not found economic relevance in an environment that rewards intellect more than brawn and manual labor. That situation often limits the scope of social contacts and potential partners extending a malaise deeply into our private lives, denying us rewarding, close relationships, and consequently delivering loneliness. What I’m implying is that after buying the big truck, fast car, or pricey motorcycle, the attention the person was looking for doesn’t arrive in a meaningful way. The grandiose television, amazing gaming console, pool, jacuzzi, or other accouterments fail to bring in those who might share in the investment of luxury. Maybe tattoos, piercings, particular clothing, or hairstyles will lure others who care about these attributes and bring sympathetic people into our orbit. Probably not. This person is developing external attributes and superficial, often antiquated traits from a different age.

When none of our consumption works to alleviate the pain of being so different than others, we fall deeper into feeling we are alone. We start to question our own value and begin the descent into crushing loneliness. Over time, we grow increasingly afraid of others and the potential for rejection. This then got me thinking about how we accumulate all this stuff and are still unhappy. Worse, though, is when we enter into a relationship and still find we are dissatisfied or lonely, though now we attribute it to depression and that with some medications, we’ll be just fine. We do not identify the underlying cause of our mental illness and instead sink further into fear and isolation.

By this time, we are well conditioned to believe that part of the malaise is related to not having exactly the car we want, maybe the television isn’t big enough, we aren’t married to the most beautiful, sexy, or strong enough person. So we go shopping as if it’s the elixir that will soothe our wounds and fix our problems. If my truck was higher, the motorcycle louder, the caliber of the gun larger, or maybe a 15″ subwoofer would make the TV give me the experience I need to find happiness. None of this can work because, at the core, we are lonely.

My belief is that we are lacking intimacy. Not the kind of intimacy found when nestled in the embrace of sex but the intimacy known to those who have come to a greater understanding of others, their spouse, and themselves. In this regard, sex is irrelevant. Good sex is like good food; tomorrow, you’ll need more, but that hamburger is never going to offer you a satisfying life, nor will sex. Intimacy is the primary path to living a good life, and again, I don’t mean sexual intimacy.

I’ve been trying to understand myself for more than 40 years now. I’m curious about the path my wife is on and how we figuratively and literally travel through life together, trying to discover the things we share experientially. Along the way, we’ve had numerous people compliment us on what a cute couple we are, but what are they really acknowledging? They are witnessing our intimacy as we appear to them as a symbiotic couple. How is it that they can pick up on our comfort with each other? I’m certain that, like us recognizing people who are together but not really together, as in they are obviously a couple but not in an intellectually intimate way, they are seeing something in how we relate and smile at one another that speaks volumes about our nature. That nature only slowly came to us the further we have gone trying to know ourselves and each other, and that has only happened due to our deep-rooted curiosity to continuously seek knowledge.

Learning really difficult stuff, be it emotional or educational, followed by introspective thinking about how you encountered it, will have you questioning what your blocks are and why you might feel you are stumbling. If you are looking primarily for sex in a relationship, you might easily find that, but unless you are exploring and learning together, real intimacy will not be built. When trying to understand and relate to others, we encounter introspective thinking, questioning how and why we feel or respond to each other in the way we do. At the point we engage with this inner dialog, we can choose to see progress in getting to know ourselves better, or we can externalize our failures of relating to someone or something by blaming others. It is not that the author of a philosophical book is difficult to understand it is that we do not have the tools honed for comprehending the writing. Learning to play an instrument is hard for everyone, and progress is often slow, but confronting your own weakness can lead to greater mastery over time; why should your personal relationships with others or yourself be different?

Then there’s the conflict with too much choice. As a society, we feed the neurosis that something better is just around the corner. With a marketplace mentality, if a husband or wife isn’t satisfying our deeper needs, it must be because we didn’t find the right one, or maybe we are driving the wrong car or living in too small a home in the wrong neighborhood. So we go shopping for something or someone new to fill the void of what is ultimately loneliness. Never do the advertisements tell the viewer to invest in themselves by reading a book or spend some time alone in nature questioning why they believe what they think they believe. Your happiness is not a six-pack of beer with your buddies while watching others participate in life; not to imply that for the well-adjusted, this wouldn’t contribute to their happiness, but in many situations, I’d say that is only one small part of a well-balanced life that is exploring intimacy.

When presented with limited choices, we must choose and often accept that we cannot keep sampling an infinite supply of possibilities. If we are cognizant of this equation, we can recognize that we must find compromise with those around us instead of just moving on with the idea that someone new will fill our emptiness. As a poor example, when we stay at a hotel and open the soap and shampoo that have been left for us, we typically don’t question it and instead just use it. Compare this to when we are at the store and need to choose between 100 different brands and types of shampoo.

As children, before our egos kicked in, we tried using language to the best of our limited ability while others were nudging us to make ourselves better understood. We worked hard to master the inner and outer dialog of communication so we could fit in with our friends and family. We thrived in that community with affirmation that we were relating to and honoring them. And then something happened. We change and are afraid that our inner turmoil is unique to ourselves and embarrassing should anyone else know our uncertainty. Instead of talking and sharing with others, we internalize the struggle and start making consumption bargains with ourselves this or that will bring us back into balance, but that doesn’t ultimately work. It is at this point, that we should be brought into deeper, more contemplative thinking, study, and conversation. The inability to alleviate the awkwardness and guilt of becoming a human in discovery is a crime against humanity and sets a potentially life-long path into ruination and self-abuse. Not having the vehicle of sharing and finding intimacy leads us down the most unhealthy of paths. This is where loneliness really starts to thrive.

While not one for casual bragging about making discoveries or stating predictions, I’m about to go out on a limb with a radical theory of what is afflicting the American character at this time and what we’ll do to fix our situation. First, we are seeing the effect of nearly 70 years of a malignant disease that has been metastasizing right in front of our faces. I’m calling it Television Effectuated Retrograde Dementia Syndrome or TERDS. Second, the television as we’ve known it is going away.

This box of banality must go away; the big question, though, is when? Somewhere in the future, people will look back at the primitivism of those who voluntarily watched decades of the rubbish broadcast to the masses. They will ask, “How and why did you waste so much of your precious mind only to suffer from TERDS?”

Just as we recognize the great harm from smoking, lead in everyday products, asbestos in building supplies, and toxic pesticides in the food chain, society will recognize the profoundly damaging effect that television is having on culture, education, and social cohesion. A large part of this awareness will arise as others discover what I’m putting forth today: society is seeing the effect of what, at its scientific base, is best described as Type 4 Diabetes. We learned that a poor diet and steady consumption of nutritionally compromised fast food mixed with a sedentary lifestyle leads to metabolic syndrome, which is the precursor to Type 2 Diabetes. Just as detrimental, the constant feeding on broadcast television creates its own intellectual metabolic syndrome, a.k.a. Type 4 Diabetes, which will lead people to TERDS.

In the mid-1980s, Joshua Meyrowitz, author of “No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior,” posed the question of why we are allowing the uncontrolled experiment of electronic media to destroy our sense of place. Then, by the second decade of the 21st century, the entire globe began witnessing what a diet of television had created. Denial of our reality had pundits blaming our malaise on social media and upon the shoulders of a younger generation. The truth is that the ills afflicting the diseased American populace are a psychic catastrophe unfolding with potentially horrible consequences. The long tail of Baby Boomers’ excess consumption of junk food TV is now lashing the sensibility of everyone it ensnares. It is time to put the beast to sleep; it is time to shut down this medium, which is nothing more than a moroseness drug trade bent on making a profit at any cost.

Reading, conversation, storytelling, exercise, exploration, discovery, and a broad diversity of sensorial inputs are necessary for good mental hygiene. Repetitive use of low-grade mental trash inhibits curiosity and the desire for broad-spectrum stimulation.

Like cigarettes, where smoking a couple a week might only have negligible damaging effects, occasional television watching could be similar. The problem here is that, like cigarettes where the consumer is quickly smoking a pack a day, the TV viewer ends up watching hours per day. This acts as a strangulation device, cutting off the user’s ability to comprehend different points of view outside of the spectrum of their conditioning. Hence, their loyalty to brands, celebrities, teams, programs, and products to the exclusion of new stimuli.

Oxygen-rich verbal exchange with others, even when it occurs through media such as books, art, and music that requires attentive listening or wandering in nature, is an elixir that lubricates the senses to bloom and facilitates the pollination of the mind. For stronger, healthier minds and ridding society of TERDS, it is time to kill your TV.

It’s 5:30 in the morning, and the trail is still dark, but it’s beautiful out here, away from sidewalks and cars. It’s dawn in the desert, and with any luck, it’ll soon be dawn for humanity. Like the coming and going of night and day, the cycle of repetition is one we are all accustomed to, but in my messaging, I feel that I’m supposed to be aware of being redundant. Funny how in music, art motifs, television and movie storylines, advertisements, sports, politics, architecture, medicine, driving a car, shopping, and so many other things, we rely on patterns being repeated again and again, but the author is supposed to find originality and limit the frequency of how much they repeat themselves. Well, here I am, beating my well-worn drum that risks raising a chorus of, “Yeah, John, we’ve heard this before,” but it bears repeating that it’s time to emerge from our dark age and face a new dawn.

If anyone should wonder if I really do think so frequently about the state of affairs regarding the bulk of humanity, I do. Every time I witness the poor intellectual and social behavior of someone in public, I equate it to poor hygiene where the person in their belligerence, refuses to clean away feces after taking a dump, nor do they much care about showering. So, we who encounter them must smell their god-awful stench until we find a route to move in avoidance of their putrefying presence. And if you suspect that I’m being overdramatic to prove a point about my disdain, you’d be fooling yourself, as it is our generalized antipathy towards intellectualism that may as well allow shit to fall from our mouths and actions. Ah, you must be one of those idealists or believers in a utopian fantasy, you ask. That would be your folly to think so; is it utopian to desire fresh foods in grocery stores, water made available for drinking and cooking, roads for commerce and recreation, or a commonly spoken language?

There are levels of civility that are achievable without demanding uniformity, conformity, or obeisance to hegemonistic monoliths, but accepting the perpetuation of inferior reasoning bordering on something akin to where our ancestors were some 200,000 years ago is, in this age, a crime against humanity. Don’t go assuming that I cannot accept my fellow hominin who is not well versed in physics, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, or chemistry, as I have an indelible amount of respect for many in labor positions. None of us have all the answers, not the smartest, not the richest, not the angriest, not the most powerful. Group intelligence arises when social cohesion allows us to function for the betterment of abstraction, such as making a better society, working to achieve something like going to space, curing disease, building monuments to our beliefs, or elevating the processes around education so we can search for a better future.

When bogged down under the gloom of uncertainty, we act petty and frightened like weasels hiding in the underbrush. Humanity, even under the threat of global illness, still has more to look forward to than we are exhibiting. We have a functional science and medicine industry on a global scale that is trying to remedy the ailments that threaten us. We could, regardless of the veracity of specifics, tackle repairing our environment if, for no other reason than when nature is at its most beautiful, we are in the highest state of delight. Our ability to communicate and share across cultural and linguistic divides no longer has any impediments; if a Mongolian teenager is a skateboarder and musician who rocks the morin khuur to make a soundtrack to their 3D animation opening credits using free software from the Netherlands and then records video of themselves on a Chinese phone before sharing the production on YouTube, I can watch the clip minutes later in Phoenix, Arizona, while Google translates the spoken words into subtitles.

Instead, I’m bombarded with stories about storms and how many people were displaced or killed, the entire globe hears about a shooter in Las Vegas that murders 60 people, or a pack of men who rape a woman in India is on an endless loop demonstrating the barbarity of it all. How does this milieu of shit inspire anyone? The sensationalized atrocities of the sickest among us are the fodder of a pack of predators who need a population cowed into fear who will lock themselves away, arm themselves, wear their leather-tough persona like a badge of aggression so everyone knows they are serious about not putting up with the sick and depraved. On the other hand, how does society demonstrate how we desire to embrace positive change regardless of the cost? How do we welcome the brainiest without bullying them into neurosis? When do we put down the rabid dog that would infect us all with its venom of vitriol and morbid malevolence? We apparently do not, and instead, we remain in darkness under the cover of ignorance.

Life in the watery domain, life in the gaseous realm, life within other matter, and then there is our life in the universe of thought. Although imbued with cognitive ability, the majority of our time spent is similar to the wren while looking for morsels to sustain themselves or that of the sardine locked in a giant school.

When and how are we supposed to look within the catalog of what we’ve fed our mind and imagination? Can we excavate a meaningful wealth of articulation that might sustain our most human characteristics? Why do we still relegate this task to such a small cadre to whom we’ve given the titles artist or creator?

As I sit here in the warm breeze of the Sonoran desert, miles away from the city but still close enough to the road to hear cars passing by, I try to ask myself, what is it that drives me to seek out these places of solitude? What do I believe or hope to understand as a lizard scurries by or the faint song of birds in the sparse landscape is heard? What might someone who’s never been here think of if they were to take my place? Would their experience be close enough to my own as to be indistinguishable?

Maybe this line of thinking is a silly exercise similar to wondering what the flavor of strawberry means to the next 100 people I encounter. Somehow, this relegates me to feeling like I’m in a school of fish and I’m asking the other sardines to meaningfully describe how they are perceiving the ocean water surrounding them. But they are fish living instinctually and have not left a sculpture or painting behind that reflects the time they lived in any particular period of their evolution.

The plants are mostly still, and if they do move, it’s imperceptible until a wind kicks up and agitates their solemn meditation of being witness to all that moves around and over them. We people, on the other hand, abhor this vacuum of perceived nothingness. More often than not, we bring along our frenetic chaos of noise, which has come to represent purpose while warding off isolation so that we might tolerate a place in which we would otherwise be alone.

We drag this construct, learned by an ever-present television or smartphone, into every inch of our lives. In our cars, we must have music, a podcast, or a talk show that figuratively allows us to remain with others. While on the trail, river, ocean, or almost any other pathway where precious quiet might be appreciated, we plug in our earbuds and bring the tools that absolve our minds from having a conversation with ourselves.

It’s not uncommon in my encounters with the baking flora of this environment to enter into a nearly symbiotic relationship with the grass, the cactus, or a small bush, in which I experience about the same amount of movement and an equal bit of communication. I’m an immovable fixture in the landscape, a witness to a world where reality is slow to change. But then, in an instant, I’ll be thrust back into the maelstrom of my artificial reality, where I’ll reluctantly surrender solitude for the existence I’m most familiar with being a sardine.

And like the sardine lost in a vast school stretching 7 kilometers before me and nearly a kilometer on either side of me, I swim in the shit left by the sardines ahead of me, blind to my many neighbors soiling the environment. As people, we move along, never questioning how our fogged minds resemble the feces-laden water through which sardines follow each other. Such is the school that values social cohesion more than individuality.

My Facebook page is typically populated with some of the following subjects:

• Synthesizers
• German news and culture
• Philosophy
• Gilles Deleuze
• Computer graphics
• Electronic music
• Audio engineering
• Photogrammetry matters
• Blender 3D
• Computational design
• Various Artists
• Artificial intelligence
• Generative arts
• Gourmet food sources
• A few museums
• Whitewater adventure travel

And yet the Facebook engine makes suggestions for me such as Todd Rundgren instead of Blixa Bargeld, viral videos instead of music tutorials, worn-out memes trying to target my age group, tributes to old actors from the 80s as though I were into that kind of thing, medications for ailments that don’t affect me (yet), even going so far as to present me with assisted living options. WTF?

I’m not into Star Wars, comic books, fast food restaurant openings, John Lennon’s birthday, retiree activities, or looking in on animals tortured by living in zoos. What is interesting is how Facebook is trying to pigeonhole me into a demographic that some indicators are telling them I should be fitting into.

I also notice that when I’m looking at other people’s posts on my page, the comments in a language other than English are filtered out, and I have to ask to see “All Comments.” What kind of intolerance for things that are different are these Borgs fostering?

It’s obvious there is a peering agreement with Google for what I search for, or maybe it’s just Facebook reading cookies from my computer, but they should be able to see that I don’t just watch Russian crash videos and people doing stupid stuff or search for what ails me. Why don’t they suggest cooking videos from Indonesia, music from Poland, or rafting adventures from South America? Nope, none of that, just the shit that appeals to my lizard brain for quick dopamine release. But that’s NOT what I want, and because of that, I’m in a constant battle to click on the Hide All Recommendations from this content provider as I did with this Pro Football Hall of Fame crap.

Maybe Facebook is an advanced artificial intelligence nostalgia machine looking to abuse my sense of desiring the familiar. I’m 57 and somehow, the algorithm thinks I’d benefit from having a skateboard channel popped into my awareness. Now, either it is calculating through my purchases and previous viewing habits that I’m still into skateboarding, or it’s looking to have me connect with a version of myself from 43 years ago. How do I tell the snippet of code dedicated to John that I abhor nostalgia and that in its attempt to exploit my weakness, it is in fact breeding resentment?