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DOING NOTHING:
THE ULTIMATE EXPRESSION OF
FREE WILL
In one callous click, I closed the Firefox tab that displayed the story of "12 soldiers dead, many more wounded."
The sight of the headline was a jarring buzzkill.
I had already read the horrific story of the murderous Army psychiatrist as I checked my email. Yahoo lists 5 headlines on your mailbox's homepage. They are frequently alluring links, since I don't tend to allocate any time in the day to seeking out the news.
After reading the news, I Ctrl-T'd a new tab so I could go to Hulu and watch the latest episode of "Modern Family".
That show is getting really good. The straight, 40 year old father character is amazing. He has successfully reincarnated Steve Carell's cheese-ball schmoozer without being derivative.
So, as the episode ended and I minimized the full-screen Hulu page, I was still resonating with a grin from the final tag ending that featured a skinny guy looking in horror as his fat boyfriend charges at him, attempting to jump up into his arms ...
... when what to my wandering eyes should appear but the Yahoo-News Firefox tab that vividly resurrected the emotional odor I had just experienced twenty minutes ago.
There is no need to dissect the details of the shooting spree; we have seen enough of them in our lifetime that there is now a desensitized version of the shock we once felt. It's still painful and real, but it stretches its limits of pity to more than just the immediate victims. It hurts to know that all of us are just one precarious card of fortune away from being a bystander in a shooting spree, a passenger on a crashing plane, a victim of a drunk-driver.
It hurts to know that the perpetrators of the crime still have their fundamental humanity about themselves. In general, they are not crazy in the chemically imbalanced, distorted faculties sense. They are crazy in the rational sense. They have been convinced that the world is this unfair, which legitimizes their behavior as a logical outgrowth of the collective insanity.
So when I tell you I callously closed the tab describing this story, there was a true emotional response to the story I was attempting to quell.
The juxtaposition of my own hedonistic enjoyment of "Modern Family" with the reminder that reality is not so farcical was an immediate bilious hiccup.
My instant reaction was to click the tab closed so that the themes of death, disenfranchisement, and depression wouldn't discolor the happy mood I had concocted. 
The power of the mouse-click was to completely remove the sordid events from my universe. As soon as it was gone, though, a feeling of guilt crept in. Should any of us, as feeling moral agents in this world, be able to so quickly anesthetize ourselves to others' suffering? I felt a bit like a monarch who did not want to hear grim stories of peasants starving in the fields; nay, bring me another jester!
The unprecedented power the internet provides us to be close to people and events around the world is unnervingly simultaneous with the distance and ease of separation it affords us as a medium.
The internet as an interface still makes genuine pathos ossible, but it also provides an artificially easy way to remove yourself from the situation as soon as the mood strikes.
[BACK TO HUMOR] [back to home]
The freedom to care for only as long as my attention span desires seems a bit too solipsitic for a grown up human. Can anything still strike my core with fitting gravity? In the pace of normal, modern life, I feel like the current runs too quickly for anything to sink to the bottom.
We modern humans are losing an experience of deep time, an experience vividly familiar to our eons of ancestors as well as to the animals that share the earth with us. In order to register deep time, the body and the mind need to be in one place and with one trajectory long enough to make the initial passing chatter of our brains gradually peter out. And trust me, the chatter will subside if you give it time. The flurry of the brain's chain of association does not want to go on indefinitely.
It's a waste of energy to run an electrical unit like the brain at full capacity.
When ideas keep parading across our inner theater, we can divide the time by seconds. The individual thoughts come slightly faster than the speed of normal speech. It is a familiar standard by which to measure the passage of time.
However, when the ideas stop, we see fewer buoys floating in the stream of consciousness.
Without realizing it, we manage to drift into rudderless, featureless, endless horizons of ocean. The undulation of waves reminds us that this stillness we feel paradoxically floats on top of an ever-changing world. But the landscape has ceased to be omething we can see and name; when you're really in a trance, your brain is in a pre-lingual state. Whether that's an evolutionary manifestation - that we default back to a more generic animal consciousness - or just a heavily right-brained state in which the conversational part of the brain goes into "Hibernate" mode, there is a different sense of "being" that is felt when one is removed from linguistic referents.
The brain, pardon the computer metaphors, will stay with all of its memory and processing power engaged until it sees the system is inactive for a few minutes. At that point, we launch a screen saver we call a daydream, reverie, or trance. You may be unfolding a never ending sentence in your mind (like those continuously overlapping pipes), visualizing things you've recently seen or would like to see (like those morphing geometric line patterns) , or just zoning out into a quiet stillness (like the flashing Windows logo against the blackscreen).
The fact remains that during this time, productivity is low, if not moot. In our achievement/consumption driven culture, this qualifies as a waste of time. Think of the opportunity cost of the ten minutes you just spent doing nothing!
With all the blessings that modern life offers us, its concurrent curse is the fact that we feel obliged to take advantage of as many of them as possible. We work and sleep an abhorrent majority of our lives away. Once nutritional and other errands are subtracted from the remaining balance, we are lucky if we average two or three hours of pure volitional time in a day.
While we are likely to fill up that time with activities we choose like working out, watching tv, reading a book, etc., I hesitate to call these activities truly free.
Often, our sense of scheduling is so domineering that we feel like we need to fit as much in to our "free time" as possible. Hence, though we may be relatively free to choose how to spend our time, we are not free in the sense of whether or not to choose. There is still a feeling of compulsion in the mental exercise of "what should I do now?"
Ironically, I feel that in this modern age that choosing to do nothing is the ultimate expression of free will. It is putting your feet down in the bottom of the river and refusing to be ushered along by the current.
It acknowledges that one's inevitable path lies downstream, but defiantly treads water to prolong the experience of one particular part of the scenery.
How did we end up at this topic when we started out surprised by the emotional entanglements of the internet?
Living alone, as I do, the internet is a useful vessel for importing human experience into my cave ... but, I'm trying to grant myself permission to go lie on my bed, do nothing, and stare into space ...
because that's where I'm more likely to find a genuine human experience.