Oversaturation, "Love Trauma Syndrome", and Cool Imagery from the Microworld
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On Content, Fakeness, and Inundation
In this video, Paul Kingsnorth discusses something rather dear to my heart, and something he eloquently expressed in his book Savage Gods, which, following the writing of that book, he did not write for a year. It’s a tremendous conundrum to be a writer in a world that is absolutely inundated with words.
Like Kingsnorth, I’ve also always wanted to be a writer, but even from a young age I felt so strongly that I had somehow arrived on the scene too late: I would try anyway, but even as a child, the world felt so saturated. And as Kingsnorth says, we’ve reached this nadir where all writing is reduced to content, to snippets, to slogans, and at a certain point, you’re just contributing to the deafening noise, no matter how hard you try to create something worthwhile. Just another bit of content in an indescriminate binge.
It makes me feel a lot of grief, a grief I’ve felt all my life, about how I seem to have been born as the party is ending — as Chris Ryan has described it somewhere: my generation arrived when all of the people are already passed out on the couches, there’s spilled beer and cigarette butts all over the tables and floor, people are puking in the toilets, and I’ve just arrived. I just got here, and the hosts are asking me to help clean up because perhaps I’m the only one sober enough to do so.
He also touches on the problems we face with A.I. and what I’ve been referring to as “reality breakdown.” We’ve already been experiencing this reality breakdown over the past several years as people’s understanding of events has become increasingly sloganistic and abstracted, mediated through technology that inherently leaves out context, leading often to misinformation and a broader misunderstanding of the world that we live in. This will only get worse, as Kingsnorth says, when we truly can’t differentiate between what is and isn’t real. For some people, this will just stoke their biases and prejudices and further silo them; for others, this will be a sort of “psychological torture” where un-reality, and its increasingly bizarre and incoherent dictates, will make us feel more and more dislodged, dislocated, and unmoored.
How many words have already been written? How much film has already been shot? Is it justifiable to use the internet as a means to communicate the need to retreat from such artificiality? Sometimes, I really don’t know. And then often, we’re told by people that yes, it is justified, and in fact, it is needed. Because they need their stories to be told. They need someone to translate what they are experiencing in the real world and transmit it into the artificial world.
What I’ve felt for many months now is that as we reach this bedrock of artificiality, virtuality, and fakeness, there will be a fork in our path. On the one side, we can lean into the virtual world and allow the Machine to take over. On the other, the side I hope we can help emphasize, we will turn away from it and toward what is real. We are hitting a rock-bottom of fakeness as a species, and, like addicts, we may only change course when it becomes so undeniably alienating and toxic that we have to change course.
So the question posed in this video is an interesting one: how do we maintain sanity while feeling like we need to look into the abyss and explain what we see so that the others don’t feel so alone? How do we “hide” from the world while also helping others be seen? How do we maintain a connection to our own innate sensibilities, our own intuition, our own compasses, when we’re being shouted to believe this or that, tow this or that line, support this or that cause, and don’t you dare question a thing?
Unlike Kingsnorth, who truly has done his time and has better things to write about than the news, I don’t feel like I can retreat from all of the nonsense — not yet at least. Though I don’t believe our nervous systems, our biology, our cognitive function, or any other part of our being is truly capable of dealing with the level of inundation we’re experiencing today, I do feel that somehow I have an obligation, with a lot of discernment, to try and witness and alchemize it.
The Continued Pathologizing of Normal Human Experience
We’ve all been dumped, and we’ve all been the dumper. Love is challenging, and it represents a very courageous risk that we all take on: the risk of heartbreak, yes, but also the risk of intimacy, wherein your partner holds up a mirror to you, forcing you to see yourself a bit more clearly in your ugliness, and your beauty. Breakups can represent a real self-reckoning, which is an important part of individuation, and ultimately just becoming a better person. In a breakup, you’re compelled to see how you are the common demoninator in your own suffering and how your behavior impacts other people. It’s a brutal, earth-shattering experience to go through a break-up, and back in the early 2000s, a psychiatrist named Richard B. Rosse decided to codify the grief experienced by people as “love trauma syndrome.”
Today, with the help of electro-stimulation technology, as per this article from The Guardian, for only £400 ($506.46), you can “treat” this so-called love trauma syndrome, otherwise known as normal human grief and bereavement.
Leaving aside the very small sample size from the clinical trial in reference, isn’t it interesting how grief has become something that needs to be “treated” through psychopharmacology, therapy, and now technology? The Guardian author writes, “LTS can cause emotional distress, depression, anxiety, insomnia, mood swings, obsessive thoughts, and a greater risk of suicide, as well as feelings of insecurity, helplessness and guilt.” While obviously suicidality is a serious concern, it is ultimately bizarre to me to consider pathologizing these very natural and generative aspects of pain, and trying to find a “treatment” to make those “symptoms” go away.
If you were horrible to your partner and they broke up with you because of it, that guilt is likely to generate a positive change in your character. Breakups can improve our ability to empathize; assess our own behavior; consider our discernment issues, our projections, and our propensity to unconsciously slip into complexes; and make important changes to how we treat people. It’s normal to feel depressed and anxious and helpless when you experience loss, and going through such pain helps a person become more resilient. At what point do these interventions prevent our growth?
The idea of literally electrically stimulating the brain to get over a boyfriend sounds so dystopian to me. Pain, especially emotional pain, is part of the human condition. I can’t help but to read this as another means of us separating ourselves from the living, complex, world — deepening our connection to a machine-mediated world. This idea that we should just relieve ourselves from suffering after a breakup just seems like another step in the direction of a soma-doped, Brave New World-esque world where pleasure and the avoidance of pain will be the ultimate virtue, conveniently allowing us to continue being productive, unmessy, efficient cogs in an earth-devouring machine.
I will definitely be watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this weekend.
Because I wanted to try and describe the nature of our fractal microscopic environment for the DITG series, I acquired a microscope. I really wanted to capture photosynthesis — in some sense to represent visually the miracle that it is and its importance to all life on earth. It really is the beginning of a long chain of chemical reactions, relationships, and a transformation from sunlight into sugasrs, and fats. This reality is something largely unconcious and underappreciated in our culture.
But the tricky part is that most chloroplasts (plant cells that do the splitting of CO2) are very, very, very tiny and tightly packed so even a microscope that can magnify at few hundred to a few thousand times can’t really make out the individual cells and their movement. I made this mistake by trying to observe common house plants and aspen leaves. However, I knew it was possible as I had seen some incredible footage of it on some nature documentary. So a little bit later, after some internet searching, I discovered there is a specific species of essentially pond weed that was common in the aquarium hobby that had very large plant cells (inside of petals or the leaves themselves) that were only a few chloroplasts thick, allowing plenty of light to shine through the plant. Not only this, but the chloroplasts themselves were reletively large and very, very active. Even to the naked eye and without speeding things up digitally, they have movement.
After ordering this sad plant flown from God-knows-where, and finally getting the magical images I wanted, I just felt too bad to throw this thing away. Which prompted me to buy a small fish tank, with more plants, then with tiny little shrimp, which led to a bigger tank, and now fish… I fell for the aquarium hobby. We are shrimp people now.
Anyway, after establishing this little micro-ecosystem in our apartment, all sorts of microscopic life began to pop up all over. It was really addicting to watch on a day to day basis, and even more to collect samples and watch them under the micro-scope.
Here are some of my favorite little lifeforms that began to sporadically appear all over my tank.
These are some sort of trumpet-like creatures that were living in algae clumps. They would slowly stretch out sucking in water into the wide opening, and then quickly shrinking back.
This was the pond weed. A wide angle shot (#4 is the closeup) you can begin to see clusters of chloroplast “blocks.”
Weird little green discs began to appear on my tank wall. And upon microscopic inspection, I had a green little packman made up of tiny chloroplast cells.
Here is the close-up of the pond weed. Those tiny green balls are individual chloroplast cells that slowly move around their little block, trying to find the best sun exposure.
Some pest snail eggs hitched a ride on the back of some plant that we got from Maren’s brother and began to overpopulate the tank, leaving these little egg sacs everywhere. This is a very large magnification of those tiny snail embryos .
Chloroplasts within algae.
Same as above.
This little guy is called a hydra. This tiny little organism attaches itself to everything and extends these little hydra-headed, shocking tentacles into the water trying to find food. They are called hydra because if they get broken or eaten, the pieces will grow back into a whole hydra, which makes them very hard to deal with. They can be deadly to baby shrimps and snails. Trust me. It’s really cool to watch them in real-time move and feel around their environment.
This is one of those baby snails a little more developed and with a tiny shell and really interesting zig-zagging formation (maybe its digestive tract?).
Anyways, it’s nice to share some fun footage I haven’t been able to share anywhere else. Really has made me appreciate the amount of life that surrounds us at all times.
A World Made in the Image of the Left Hemisphere - A Discussion of The Master and His Emissary
We just released a new podcast where we discussed Iain McGilchrist’s incredibly important and instructive book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. This profound book goes into the lateralization of our brains, and how the left hemisphere of our brains (mechanical, objectifying, reductionistic, exploitative) has come to dominate our world and our conception of it. The right hemisphere of our brain (holistic, living, individualistic, complex), the part that sees ourselves as embedded in context, the Master, has been usurped by his Emissary, leading us, perhaps, to our own demise.
This conversation was very enjoyable to prepare for, and we hope that it is an informative breakdown (while certainly not a substitute) of the book and the lessons contained within.
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