The modest mastery of our practical lives is what fulfilled us for tens of thousands of years — until technology and capitalism decided it was entirely dispensable. If we are to figure out why despair has spread so rapidly in so many left-behind communities, the atrophying of the practical vocations of the past — and the meaning they gave to people’s lives — seems as useful a place to explore as economic indices.
So are the bonds we used to form in our everyday interactions — the nods and pleasantries of neighbors, the daily facial recognition in the mall or the street. Here too the allure of virtual interaction has helped decimate the space for actual community. When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates. Turkle describes one of the many small consequences in an American city: “Kara, in her 50s, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: ‘Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in … No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them.’ ”
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”
He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”
The early days of the retreat passed by, the novelty slowly ceding to a reckoning that my meditation skills were now being tested more aggressively. Thoughts began to bubble up; memories clouded the present; the silent sessions began to be edged by a little anxiety.
I knew the scar tissue from this formative trauma was still in my soul. I had spent two decades in therapy, untangling and exploring it, learning how it had made intimacy with others so frightening, how it had made my own spasms of adolescent depression even more acute, how living with that kind of pain from the most powerful source of love in my life had made me the profoundly broken vessel I am. But I had never felt it so vividly since the very years it had first engulfed and defined me. It was as if, having slowly and progressively removed every distraction from my life, I was suddenly faced with what I had been distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree, I stopped, and suddenly found myself bent over, convulsed with the newly present pain, sobbing.
And this time, even as I eventually made it back to the meditation hall, there was no relief. I couldn’t call my wife or a friend and talk it over. I couldn’t check my email or refresh my Instagram or text someone who might share the pain. I couldn’t ask one of my fellows if they had experienced something similar. I waited for the mood to lift, but it deepened. Hours went by in silence as my heart beat anxiously and my mind reeled.
I decided I would get some distance by trying to describe what I was feeling. The two words “extreme suffering” won the naming contest in my head. And when I had my 15-minute counseling session with my assigned counselor a day later, the words just kept tumbling out. After my panicked, anguished confession, he looked at me, one eyebrow raised, with a beatific half-smile. “Oh, that’s perfectly normal,” he deadpanned warmly. “Don’t worry. Be patient. It will resolve itself.” And in time, it did. Over the next day, the feelings began to ebb, my meditation improved, the sadness shifted into a kind of calm and rest. I felt other things from my childhood — the beauty of the forests, the joy of friends, the support of my older brother, the love of my late maternal grandmother. Yes, I prayed, and prayed for relief. But this lifting did not feel like divine intervention, let alone a result of effort, but more like a natural process of revisiting and healing and recovering. It felt like an ancient, long-buried gift.
In his survey of how the modern West lost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief.
We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action.
The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.
The English Reformation began, one recalls, with an assault on the monasteries, and what silence the Protestants didn’t banish the philosophers of the Enlightenment mocked. Gibbon and Voltaire defined the Enlightenment’s posture toward the monkish: from condescension to outright contempt. The roar and disruption of the Industrial Revolution violated what quiet still remained until modern capitalism made business central to our culture and the ever-more efficient meeting of needs and wants our primary collective goal. We became a civilization of getting things done — with the development of America, in some ways, as its crowning achievement. Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind. The smartphone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist of this ratchet, in which those few remaining redoubts of quiet — the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives — are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise.
And yet our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.
Except, of course, there is the option of a spiritual reconciliation to this futility, an attempt to transcend the unending cycle of impermanent human achievement. THERE IS A RECOGNITION THAT BEYOND MERE DOING, THERE IS ALSO BEING; THAT AT THE END OF LIFE, THERE IS ALSO THE GREAT SILENCE OF DEATH WITH WHICH WE MUST EVENTUALLY MAKE OUR PEACE. From the moment I entered a church in my childhood, I understood that this place was different because it was so quiet. Those liturgical pauses that would never do in a theater, those minutes of quiet after communion when we were encouraged to get lost in prayer, those liturgical spaces that seemed to insist that we are in no hurry here. And this silence demarcated what we once understood as the sacred, marking a space beyond the secular world of noise and business, busyness and shopping.
The only place like it was the library, and the silence there also pointed to something beyond it — to the learning that required time and patience, to the pursuit of truth that left practical life behind. Like the moment of silence we sometimes honor in the wake of a tragedy, the act of not speaking signals that we are responding to something deeper than the quotidian, something more profound than words can fully express. This is not our ordinary life.
Most civilizations, including our own, have understood this in the past. Millennia ago, as the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued, the unnameable, often inscrutably silent God of the Jewish Scriptures intersected with Plato’s concept of a divinity so beyond human understanding and imperfection that no words could accurately describe it. The hidden God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures spoke often by not speaking. And Jesus, like the Buddha, revealed as much by his silences as by his words. He was a preacher who yet wandered for 40 days in the desert; a prisoner who refused to defend himself at his trial. At the converted novitiate at the retreat, they had left two stained-glass windows depicting Jesus. In one, he is in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood in terror, alone before his execution. In the other, he is seated at the Last Supper, with the disciple John the Beloved resting his head on Jesus’s chest. HE IS SPEAKING IN NEITHER.
That Judeo-Christian tradition recognized a critical distinction — and tension — between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life. The Sabbath — the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity — was a collective imposition of relative silence, a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity. It helped define much of Western public life once a week for centuries — only to dissipate, with scarcely a passing regret, into the commercial cacophony of the past couple of decades. It reflected a now-battered belief that a sustained spiritual life is simply unfeasible for most mortals without these refuges from noise and work to buffer us and remind us who we really are. But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.
This changes us. It slowly removes — without our even noticing it — the very spaces where we can gain a footing in our minds and souls that is not captive to constant pressures or desires or duties. And the smartphone has all but banished them. Thoreau issued his jeremiad against those pressures more than a century ago: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”
And I'm becoming the rock with eyelids that I used to joke about 20 years ago. My health has declined and my belly has protruded. Indeed. Distracted by a million bits of meaningless minutiae on the pretence that I will come across a kernel of datum that will do something more than concuss my dulled reasoning and increasingly malnourished mind. One senselessly culled jot of witticism that is absent any wit whatsoever and onto the next feeble attempt of expressing someone other than myself. From A to Zed, the whole show is one big shrilling corybantic cacophony and I pretend to be the Maestro but there's one major problem. In order to lead an orchestra, the Maestro needs to know who is playing the gig and where it's being conducted. As the Maestro, if I’m too in touch with my iPhone, I’ll neglect to conduct the orchestra members and likely face the crowd who will be equally as clueless as I have been, but enough is more than enough. Who is now the Messiah who still wants to speak to us about the faith of a mustard seed and the importance of silence and solitude. Science claims God is no longer necessary as the scientific method proffers to mollify our Messiah. Christian atheists? Couldn't be, could it? Texts and snapchats and my most recent vacation just this past June near John's Pass but at Treasure Island was more like a Fantasy Island spoof. A veritable sunshiny day as the Brady Bunch kids sang on one of the episodes. But who's got time for the sun if to go out into it might melt the pricey screen protector. Gadgets, gimmickry, senselessly time killing games, iPhones, iPads, iMacs and, in all earnest, I don't have a clue how we ever drove hours on end without all the now unnecessary iClouds for moth destroying memorabaliea we hold onto like some holy reliquary with the risible accoutrements. Well, we did and fewer of us died because a text message took our eyes off the road for more than a millisecond. Hardly. I've looked over while driving and observed guys and gals and grandparents wide eyed with sluggardly looking open mouths fixated on Smartphones. Asleep, literally, at the wheel. And sooner than later, I saw the gal wired into T-Mobile get T-boned by a muttonhead adjusting his in-phone GPS settings. BANG! Remember the old Bumper Cars? This fiasco was equally as intentional but neither knew where they were or where they would soon be going. One entered the ICU and the other's name was easily accessible via the World Wide Web. Obituaries are longer and lives are much shorter. BANG! Tag and bag the gal, the guy and a grandchild won't see her grandparents again. BANG! Show is over and to live so long just to be taken out by a text.
Overtime for a TO baby! Back to the arcane but with some semblance of sanity. Out of here. And come December, Lord willing, I'll be with my wife and daughter on Steps Beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico and Christ Jesus will be stepping with us. But not a replay of taking pictures of seafood or taking my, you got it, iPhone into the Gulf Coast pretty waters at Ft DeSota Beach. I captured a video of a Conk shell until I picked it from the bottom of sandbar to find it was a really real crab. The last living sea-creatures I saw weren’t real but looked like they were when my screensavor popped up to protect the damnable screen.
But, all that said, I have still a mustard seed of faith. All things work together for good upon reuniting with my Maker. I’m fixing to face the fall winds and not be blown over by the adverse winds of apps found inside the virtual reality’s store. I’ve never met a soul at this store. Just stared, blankly. Even as I attempt to tie a last knot on this assay or treatise (there’s an app for synonyms), I find myself playing with words so as to procrastinate meeting head-on the sounds of silence. In 1997, hangtough was my website. Inspirational but not nearly as time consuming. The technology’s limitations necessarily let me off a hook that only in the last few years I baited with my own self-induced need to be noticed. Pitiful. The ‘Like’ button has lost all allure. For God’s sake, literally, it’s time to see Autumn Leaves outside instead of listening to the old jazz standard in isolation merely tell a tale about the leaves falling past my window. I’ll be back but never again for mere bits of data and endless dialogues. Jake, Jesse and Josie are looking at me. They like to go for walks and I’m weary of lamenting the days when I wanted to as well.
There’s a time for all seasons of life and in the Fall of my own, I am not my own. I have the perfectly nostalgic knot to wrap a ribbon around Tony Orlando’s old oak tree. The days of radios. Ciao.
-BGJ
TIRED OF TRYING
January 1, 1999
I am so terribly tired, of trying to enjoy
The things that I used to like, as a little boy
I've lost it seems the ability, to see the sky so blue
Flying kites, riding bikes, and singing a song or two
I am so terribly tired, of searching for the key
That will unlock a world of happiness, especially for me
A world of kids on skates, playing in the sun
The sounds of my big brother laughing, we had so much fun
But today I saw a glimpse, of the sun that once was bright
The sun that shined on me, on those days of flying kites
And I'm not exactly sure, why things changed today
When yesterday seemed so cloudy, lonely and grey
For all I did was something, I used to do years ago
I told God I was tired, turned it all over and let go...
Copyright © 1997 Brian G. Jett
