Month: January 2018

Today’s the first day of the year that I woke up and, instead of meditating, decided to dive into the social media wormhole. It suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

I dramatically decreased my social media use after reading an interview with technologist Jaron Lanier. He didn’t go into any kind of deep analysis of human psyche or privacy or capitalism, but rather a nonchalant well obvz it’s all for behavior modification. I’ve heard/read/thought so many reasons why companies like Facebook probably don’t have my best intentions in mind, but what I appreciate about Lanier’s reason is that it places the responsibility not on someone else’s terms of agreement or monetary aspirations or prowess to protect against hackers – instead, it’s about me. And I know my behavior has definitely been affected, if not somewhat driven, by my decade of assertive online presence.

What does it mean to wake up on the wrong side of the digital divide? For starters, all the days leading up to today, I quite enjoyed exposing my eyes to the light outside my window. I don’t know the first thing about describing the difference between blue light and full spectrum light, other than the fact that the former comes from my phone and the latter comes from…the universe. What I can tell you on a molecular level is that waking up and immediately glaring into my phone is the optical version of starting off my day with a breakfast of fries and Mountain Dew. My eyes immediately began to feel grainy, and an unsleepy tiredness overcame me, one that didn’t feel that different from food coma.

When I come out of my morning meditations, I feel motivated and thankful, calm and fulfilled. But my 10 minutes of morning Instagram scrolling managed to pack in feelings of outrage, envy, self-loathing, and inertia. Oftentimes, even positive conversations about social media at some point ends up with someone saying what am I doing with my life? and if there’s one thing that I can confirm doesn’t help lead to a constructive answer to that question, it’s unwrapping each day with the rude awakening of the internet.

I’ve learned that what distinguishes good days and bad days for me is control. If I feel like I’m managing things by carefully processing and approaching with some foresight, I can take on pretty much anything. On the other hand, allowing myself to spend my first few moments scrolling through posts – each one packed with the potential to take me somewhere I’m emotionally, egotistically, politically, or physically unprepared for – even the dumbest, most minute thing that has absolutely nothing to do with me can derail me.

This morning was kind of shitty but a great reminder of the opportunities that await each day. Seize or be seized.

Two words were deposited into my vocabulary bank toward the end of last year:

Neophilia – a love or enthusiasm for the new and novel

Biophilia – a love of life and the living world

They seem to be opposing concepts – one centered around that which is new and maybe even fleeting. The other focused on that which has existed for eons, and will continue to grow and thrive well beyond anyone’s time on this earth.

So what does it mean when a neophyte like myself begins to become a biophile? Can I call myself either, knowing that I may only have a mild case of both? I love the new, but I know how to commit. I have a deep and growing sense of connection with nature, but I still live in the city and am addicted to plastic. Can I straddle both, or does the temporality of one and permanence of the other mean I have to choose a side?

I think what draws me alike to the exhilaration of new things, and the comfort of nature’s constancy, is that both are unfamiliar. In both circumstances, I approach not knowing much, feeling like I need to earn my place or have something to prove. My challenge is to recognize that what I need to prove myself to is not to people or a field or a society, but to a situation or an environment. It helps me recognize that, living in a world that has existed for billions of years, all of us are neophytes. And even the most urban of us dwellers ultimately breathe air and drink water. We could all be neophytes and biophiles.

But so many of us go through this world resist change and fight nature. We enter unfamiliar situations with fear rather than awe, and so many of us have been raised to equate dirt with dirty. In the past year I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in rainforests and deserts, mountains and the ocean. What draws me to the mysterious forms I encounter is that same obsession with newness that often sets me racing toward the latest release or product or task, rather than just sitting with what has always been.

The challenge now is to embrace the part of both philias that I’ve failed to mention thus far – love. My neophilia has introduced me to so many concepts and issues, some that can be summed up as distractions that last less than a week, and others that stuck to me and have come to define me. I’m not sure if I can force my new infatuation with nature to be love, but like a good neophyte I do my best to be completely open.

I just finished the One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka and it’s got me fucked up. If you want to try sabotaging any conventional sense of new year motivation, try reading a Japanese farmer’s diatribe about why everything that’s wrong with the world is rooted in human’s desire for progress. Fukuoka is among the influential Asians of the world that I’m kind of peeved that it took me so long to come across. Although I hadn’t heard his name or philosophies mentioned in the Asian and Asian American circles I’m around, he’s one of the instigators of permaculture, and a central source of inspiration for the likes of Michael Pollan.

Some quotes that resounded with me:

“If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature’s productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.” (104)

“When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” (119)

“Nature as grasped by scientific knowledge is a nature which has been destroyed; it is a ghost possessing a skeleton, but no soul. Nature as grasped by philosophical knowledge is a theory created out of human speculation, a ghost with a soul, but no structure.” (125)

“Something born from human pride and the quest for pleasure cannot be considered true culture. True culture is born within nature, and is simple, humble, and pure. Lacking true culture, humanity will perish.” (138)

I’m still trying to grasp what it means to strive for human perfection while at the same time not be driven by productivity. These two concepts are abstract and probably impossible in their truest forms, and they’re definitely not one and the same – even though from a distance they can seem to be. Again, the mantra of doing less and being more is echoing in my head. 

If we’re honest about what’s keeping the world from reaching its fullest potential, it’s not a lack of productivity. We don’t even have to go that far-out and abstract. Across the board, the biggest challenges to nations, societies, communities, and relationships aren’t due to an overwhelming sense of inertia. And especially when it comes to the individual – measuring one’s value based on one’s output is itself an act of devaluation. Life is more than production. We are more than products.

But in this day and age, to be still is to be stagnant. The myth of productivity is hidden in plain sight – it’s clear that war, inequity, starvation, and pollution won’t be solved by simply getting more stuff done (on the contrary, so much trouble is caused by the lust for forward movement). Yet while it’s clear that productivity isn’t the answer for the world, each of us have been raised to believe that it’s the answer for us. And those of us who hope to contribute to progress must make a “mark,” which is done by working very very hard. Problematically, productivity then becomes equivalent to purpose – I am what I do, and therefore doing as much as I can is a moral obligation. Here, rest is sinful, and we are pressed to feel guilty for taking pleasure. And in such a world, the Beyoncés, Elons, and Baracks are praised as saints, as the shining examples of those who use their 24 hours each day basking in the holy grail of accomplishment. 

Those who escape being tools for their company or their nation may instead feel like one for their family, art, community, or spirit. Productivity is the constant addressing of our shoulds, and I’ve gotten so trained in this that even on days when there’s nothing I really should do, I’ll make it a task to sit down and assign myself more tasks. Otherwise, what am I here for? This is when I again need to examine if I’m equating productivity with purpose. 

At the end of each year, at my family’s home on vacation, I usually reach a breaking point. After several days not going through my routine of responsibilities, I start just looking for shit to do. I declutter the house that’s not even my own. I start tending to social media accounts I never ever think about (hello, annual LinkedIn maintenance). I know I’ve really reached the bottom of the barrel when I find myself on iTunes’ “Best Productivity Apps of the Year.” I’ll throw hours down the hole downloading, registering, testing, and discarding dozens of apps to improve my efficiency in the worlds of email, to-do lists, routine managers, and anything else you can think of making twelve of the same app for. I think of this practice as time invested for mechanisms that will help me move throughout the next year in lightning speed. Instead, it’s a hamster wheel. 

There’s the story of the germaphobe who cleaned his house spotless, and when he was done he didn’t have anything else to clean, so he started cleaning his detergent bottles. That’s not really a story, it’s just an analogy to unsuccessfully get to the point I’m trying to make.

So I spent all of this past December imagining myself sleeping early for New Year’s Eve, getting up at 6 the next morning, doing my meditation and stretches like a sensei, and then entering 2018 with the vigor of an ox. Instead, I vegged out in front of Netflix, went to bed at 2, woke up at 10, and spent the rest of the morning feeling guilty for not making the most of my day. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, after coming out of my mild session of self-loathing, I recognized that the problem isn’t that I went to bed and woke up late. It’s not the fact that by noon I hadn’t crossed anything off my to-do list. It’s that I placed so much expectation on how this morning would represent my entire life, and by extension that my very slow, rather peaceful and ideal morning was in fact an implication that I was going to spend the rest of my life being a lazy ass. But if it took all that for me to finally (or once again?) put into words that presence is action, then simply showing up for this kind of reflection is a bigger accomplishment than any task I could conquer today.

Doing less and being more – I resolve to make that a priority this year.