This is a combination post, the two requests posed as Rethoughts were “addiction vs. love,” and “how to get over a break up,” which I think go hand-in-hand. Rethoughts is not a website for “how-to’s,” which is partially why it took me so long to write this one. For one thing, I can’t point to a single step I took to mourn any of my relationships. For another, I don’t think those steps would help you anyway.

About a year ago I helped my brother make a video. He doesn’t usually ask me for help unless he’s working on something more heartfelt than he’s used to. He sent me a few songs that he was going to use and told me to think of the pain of a breakup so he could set the tone for whatever I ended up writing. I let him read through several poems that I’d written a few years before when I was going through my last breakup. One line stuck out to him “I am consumed by a memory.” He told me “that’s what I want but I need more.” The next line was “a ghost in passing,” reminding me of mourning a death. A breakup is the death of a relationship and we are required to mourn not only the memories we make but the potential, too. We, these anticipatory creatures, must suffer through remembering that which happened and that which never will. That became the theme of the video; consumed by a memory that I have not yet made. It turns out that love and addiction are very similar. Let me clarify, ROMANTIC love and addiction are nearly identical in that they follow the same neural pathways in the brain. We also show symptoms of withdrawal from love just like we’d experience in addiction. So which is it, are we like widows and widowers of the ideas of a lover, or are we junkies coming off a high? I think it’s a little of both. Love is unique in that it has a special side effect of insanity that new users quickly show symptoms of, and there’s no known cure, no treatment, no separation from it. There are few things in our human experience that can drive even the most rational person into madness like a broken heart. We are tethered, domesticated by it and giving up our wild dreams for one more taste and the only wild we know is the gnashing of our teeth until we get more. Not out of our wildness, but just another symptom.

It’s common that we go into a scrolling-induced trance before drifting off to sleep. Click, type, scroll, double-tap and repeat until we acknowledge the time and groan with dissatisfaction accompanied with dying a little inside. We wake up wondering why we are so exhausted and why we can’t be morning people as we smash “snooze” six times. I could just be speaking for myself but I’m not so sure. We know good and well that what we are doing is detrimental to our health, so why do we continue to do it?

We have forgotten, or maybe never realized, the value of time and hand it over to many distractions. It’s hard to see the opportunity cost of displaced time, but let’s take watching too much television for example. I didn’t do much research into how much time we spend watching TV so don’t lose your mind over these numbers, but according to a quick search the average adult will spend nearly 5 hours a day watching TV (a little more than 77 days per year). WTF?! If that’s accurate, then the average US adult gives over one-fifth of their life away to TV. I hate that, so let’s be a little more generous and assume it’s just 50 days per year (before I make myself sick). That is still 1,200 hours... Hours that could be going toward learning a skill or following a passion in your free time. Today’s youth watches less TV than our older generations, but I think we could insert other distractions and see that we are still misusing a significant amount of our time. Instead, why aren’t we mastering something with the time we are given?

So recap of our two main questions:

Why do we continue to do things that are detrimental to our health?

Why aren’t we mastering something with the time we have?

There are so many variables but I want to highlight the ones that I have had to rethink. Although we know that some of the things we do are detrimental, we keep convincing ourselves that they are the right things for us until we are finally brutally honest with ourselves and understand just how wrong they are. What does it take for us to see that we are so often shrouded in smoke and clutching at dust? Perhaps the realization that we have no idea what we want to do with our lives. I know it seems counterintuitive, but being active gives you energy, spending time learning satisfies your curiosity, and doing the work that you have passion for, even though you may not get paid for it yet, will invigorate you. And you will know what you want to do with your life, but you can’t wait for it to come kick you in the teeth while binge watching Friends for the tenth time (that’s not a personal attack).

It’s common that we go into a scrolling-induced trance before drifting off to sleep. Click, type, scroll, double-tap and repeat until we acknowledge the time and groan with dissatisfaction accompanied with dying a little inside. We wake up wondering why we are so exhausted and why we can’t be morning people as we smash “snooze” six times. I could just be speaking for myself but I’m not so sure. We know good and well that what we are doing is detrimental to our health, so why do we continue to do it?

We have forgotten, or maybe never realized, the value of time and hand it over to many distractions. It’s hard to see the opportunity cost of displaced time, but let’s take watching too much television for example. I didn’t do much research into how much time we spend watching TV so don’t lose your mind over these numbers, but according to a quick search the average adult will spend nearly 5 hours a day watching TV (a little more than 77 days per year). WTF?! If that’s accurate, then the average US adult gives over one-fifth of their life away to TV. I hate that, so let’s be a little more generous and assume it’s just 50 days per year (before I make myself sick). That is still 1,200 hours... Hours that could be going toward learning a skill or following a passion in your free time. Today’s youth watches less TV than our older generations, but I think we could insert other distractions and see that we are still misusing a significant amount of our time. Instead, why aren’t we mastering something with the time we are given?

So recap of our two main questions:

Why do we continue to do things that are detrimental to our health?

Why aren’t we mastering something with the time we have?

There are so many variables but I want to highlight the ones that I have had to rethink. Although we know that some of the things we do are detrimental, we keep convincing ourselves that they are the right things for us until we are finally brutally honest with ourselves and understand just how wrong they are. What does it take for us to see that we are so often shrouded in smoke and clutching at dust? Perhaps the realization that we have no idea what we want to do with our lives. I know it seems counterintuitive, but being active gives you energy, spending time learning satisfies your curiosity, and doing the work that you have passion for, even though you may not get paid for it yet, will invigorate you. And you will know what you want to do with your life, but you can’t wait for it to come kick you in the teeth while binge watching Friends for the tenth time (that’s not a personal attack).

Invisible Light

Sometimes I forget to see when I look.

I cast eyes

searching for invisible light

in you. Light that, sometimes,

You also forget to see when you look.

We only see what we are supposed to, through

a criteria of seeing things, which

measures how well we see things like

Beauty.

Or how others think we should see it.

But just as you couldn’t sufficiently describe beauty,

I don’t think we could see it

because if it is in the eye of the beholder,

We must look directly at what is happening in the eye

when we’ve beheld.

So, in a way,

it is not the thing that is beautiful,

but the experience of it.

Before you judge, try to think of a single word that completely describes you. Every single complexity must be encompassed in this one word which you’ve chosen. May we call you that word? Would you answer to it like it’s your new name?

Henry David Thoreau said that “it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see.” I don’t go to parties often but the last party I attended a guy approached me and the girl I was talking to and said something I couldn’t quite understand. I asked him, “What was that?” and I think he took it the wrong way because he offered to take this outside and fight. The girl I was talking to became fairly annoyed and got a few words in, but before it could get any worse I calmly asked him “Why would we fight?” He looked at me with drunken confusion as I told him, “we are friends, man. I wouldn’t fight you.” I didn’t really know him but he responded, “you’re right, man, I’m sorry.” After he was eventually pulled away by his friend to do something else at the party, the girl asked me how did I respond like that when it was kind of pissing her off. I told her that it was like looking into a reflection, and that I knew he didn’t really want to fight me. I saw myself and didn’t get mad because I recognized the frustration, the incoherent drunken reasoning, the creation of problems where there were none. When we judge, a thousand mirrors are held up and we can see ourselves everywhere we look, and since it is “out there,” we can point to it and say “there it is.” However, if we physically stand in front of a mirror we wouldn’t argue that the flaws we see in the reflection are not ours at all but in the mirror itself. We only see what we’ve prepared ourselves to see. It’s this self-fulfilling prophecy and form of confirmation bias. Perhaps that drunk guy really does want to hurt someone and so he looked in me to find that same longing, to see if I’d mirror him. Instead, I wanted to show him the reflection I saw, a light that he may not be observing. I could pass judgment on him and say he’s just another drunk guy, but it really is so much more complex than that. I could be cliché and say don’t judge a book by its cover; the cliché holds true.

Technology is receiving quite a bad rap lately. It’s easy to blame it since it cannot defend itself. I think we have a tendency to do that; blame the defenseless. It’s especially funny that we’ve created these incredible tools yet we’ve demonized so many of them.  A true Frankenstein story. We often create these things then judge them as monsters, as evil, as the problem laying waste to us. We rarely ever have the intention of designing a monster. I’d say we are the creatures, why else are we so inclined to find one? We are the monsters, unintended byproducts of instant gratification and addictive behavior, and symptoms of internal evils that we often fail to face. We look for external causes for what is going on internally because it is so much easier to face the tangible than the intangible because we can point to it and say “there it is!” We long for an evil to exist outside of us or a villain that explains our suffering, but sometimes we don’t need to look past ourselves.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who had just returned from a backpacking trip where he’d had no service. He told me of his many revelations in the wilderness and the clarity he experienced but then described how he felt when he finally checked his phone. No messages, no snaps; heartbreaking. He’d hoped for anything from his friends that indicated they were thinking of him. I think he had another revelation as he described this experience because he found the situation humorous after saying it out loud. Like amnesia settled in and he forgot the clarity of the wilderness, then he forgot the amnesia. Initially, he felt abandoned without notifications as if no one cared about him. I asked him if he thinks that’s true, “do your friends not care about you?” He knew it wasn’t true. His mistake was confusing his connections; a mistake I think most of us make in this Age of Communication. Meaning, the technology should be the tool that we use to increase our connection with others. Instead, we’ve made the people into tools that help us connect to our devices. Stay with me because this next part bites. Driven by our want for belonging, we’ve built relationships with our creations that were intended to cultivate stronger relationships with the people who use them. We are no longer humans. We are tools; tools using each other to connect with the technology we’ve created and we seem deeply confused about our relationships with each other.

Another friend of mine requested that I cover how we essentially post our highlights to social media then compare our real lives to others’ highlights as we grow subconsciously envious and distant from others. I feel as though that subject gets enough coverage, so I’d like to drive home another point. We’ve grown up in an Age of Information and Communication, but without the guidance of a previous generation that has navigated this new landscape of mass communication, we have maladapted to this era. We are the first to be able to communicate across cultures with incredible ease and yet we feel more and more divided in our own homes. This is the Age of Misinformation and Miscommunication. What are we actually saying with the highlights of our lives? That “this is where we belong,” but it is seemingly driven by a sense of unbelonging. So instead of feeling as though we truly belong, we provide an appearance of belonging.

I sense a reform in social media, though. More influencers are stepping up and exhibiting raw and vulnerable material, and encouraging the use of technology to actually help their followers instead of contributing to the oversaturated content streams of eye-candy and comedic relief. There is nothing wrong with the occasional indulgence in either, but I think we have used technology as an escape for long enough.