Have we reached digital obesity already?

I suspect that the idea of fasting happened upon humans when they worried that eating and drinking every day might make them forget the value and importance of food.  Further, the more they ate and drank the less they paid attention to their souls.  Thus, humans in different cultural contexts developed a system of fasting, usually within the religious contexts as well.

The cleansing detox programs like fasting, I like to imagine, date back to when humans began producing enough surplus for them to start building cities and creating what we refer to as civilizations.

As we materially progressed and prospered, the detox programs also took on different variations.  Food detox programs continue, of course.  Detox against shopping.  Against driving.  Against watching television.  Recall MTV's "Unplugged" program?  That was a detox of a different kind.

The latest along that is detox from social media and the internet itself.

There are now resorts that guarantee you that you won't be able to access the internet.  You hand over your gadgets when you check in and then for the rest of the stay there, well, you are on a digital detox.  The Travel Channel even suggests the best unplugged vacation places!  You prefer advice on that from the Wall Street Journal?

We forget that the internet and the digital applications are not the problem by themselves, writes this author at Wired.com:

We all know that social media is a mixed bag. Regular studies connect its use to anxiety, and episodes of depression. There are legitimate questions about its impact on our brains. But it has also transformed many tasks, made us more productive, and at times, helped us to feel more connected. Like any technology, it’s not the tool that poses the problem. It’s how we use that tool.

Even when acknowledging it, he writes about taking off from social media for the entire month of August.  He is off on a digital detox--his third annual treatment!

Meanwhile, over at the NY Times is this piece about "struggling to disconnect from our digital lives"

The first step for me this month will be to shore up and seal my digital borders. I have learned from too many failed experiments that there is no resisting the Pavlovian pull of a ping announcing a new email, the vibration of my phone or the seductions of the Internet once I call up even a single site.
The only way to avoid these interruptions, I have learned, is to turn them off completely. If something requires my urgent attention this month, my away message directs senders to a colleague, who knows how to reach me and also knows how much I hope he won’t try.
I’m painfully aware that letting go won’t happen easily. I’m a lab rat now, deeply accustomed to tapping that lever over and over for the tiny pellets of brief stimulation and shallow gratification that life on the Internet provides.

People have apparently been driven so much into anxiety thanks to being connected 24x7 that they are willing to pay money to get away from it all.  Or, they even sign up for the "Sabbath manifesto" and get away from all gadgets and technology on the "national day of unplugging."   I want to tell them all that they can run but cannot hide!  It is in your head!

I have my own routines to make sure I don't become a gadget zombie. But, I cannot imagine ever going on the detox route.  I have never been a fan of fasting; it is all in the moderation.  As they say in my part of the old country, "அளவுக்கு மிஞ்சினால் அமிர்தமும் நஞ" (the idea translates to "even the divine nectar can become a poison if one exceeds the limit.)  I buy European butter that is rich in fat.  The cream cheese that I buy is full fat.  I buy chocolates and gelato.  Because, I am convinced that it is in how much of those I consume and when.  Consumed appropriately the European butter is the best thing ever on warm sourdough bread.  There are few things in life more delightful than chocolate melting away in the mouth.  But then I don't do that every single meal.

That's the same with digital consumption too.  Yes, it is a consumption; as the author of the NY Times essay put it:

it’s as if I’m sitting in front of a bowl of Doritos or Hershey’s Kisses and compulsively consuming them, except in this case, it’s bytes, not bites. The more of them I take in, the more dissatisfied and hungrier I feel.

Perhaps moderation is not easy for us humans.  Digital fasting is, thus, merely the latest of the forced removal of self from consumption.  Who knows what comes next!

A "modeled imitation of the observed reality"

In The Matrix, Morpheus reminds Neo that it is our brains that tell us what we think a smell is, what a taste is, what the world is.  Based on all that, we then think of the universe in a certain way.  What if it is all a figment of our imagination?

Ancient Hindu philosophers provided even the illiterate like me to conveniently refer to all that figment of our imagination as Maya.  It is all a grand illusion.  We think the red hot chili pepper is insanely spicy and pungent.  But, does that mean it really is?  What exactly is real and what is not real?  Am I real?   What if the "insane" descriptions of the world that those in the cuckoo's nests offer are the real descriptions of the world?  What if we are the ones trapped in an asylum and we don't even know it?

Some day, when we figure out where consciousness comes from, maybe we will sort those questions out once and for all.  Until then, we struggle through.  And we have to make a conscious effort to deal with these tough questions especially now when it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the real from the virtual.  You think you are listening to a cello being played, when it turns out that a kid is producing those sounds through a computer.  Friends are virtual. Even that most primal of all--sex--doesn't have to be real anymore!

I had designed for myself deep reads for this summer so that I can engage with those questions for a while and continue to chip away at my existential struggle of "who am I?" and "what the heck is all this about?"  The final one in the list is John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  Yes, a non-fiction work by the great storyteller.  As is noted in the introduction in the Penguin edition that I am reading:

If we read and consider Sea of Cortez in all its complexity, we see John Steinbeck fusing science and philosophy, art and ethics by combining the compelling if complex metaphysics of Ed Ricketts with his own commitment to social action by a species for whom he never gave up hope, and whom he believed could and would triumph over the tragic miracle of its own consciousness.

The travel adventure is, to use Alfred Hitchcock's favorite, a MacGuffin.  Yes, Steinbeck the marine biologist will give me details about invertebrates and I would not really care about that.

"We were curious" writes Steinbeck in the introduction:

Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny.  We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality.

And he gives an example of the reality versus what we construct it to be:

The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies.  The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, not does he smell that way.  

The travel adventure is a MacGuffin.  I don't want my entire life to be a MacGuffin.

Get ready for a year-long GOP rendition of the Mahabharata

I usually stay away from wasting spending my time blogging about the presidential election issues.  But, sometimes, like in this one, I yield to the temptation ;)

Next week, the Grand Old-People Party debates begin.  It is going to be wonderful theatre from the first minute of the first debate of the primaries next week all the way to the convention in mid-July next year.  Not that we have not been entertained until now; the Donald has pretty much made himself the entertainer-in-chief.

All the theatrics aside,on a substantive level, I am disappointed that Rand Paul has faded away already.  He contributed a great deal to the national (and international) discussions on the unconstitutional and secretive security apparatus, the presidential wars without Congressional approval, and a lot more which most other wimps senators did not want to address.

Even as his campaign struggles, many of his issues are doing surprisingly well—in fact, that’s a big part of the reason why Paul has struggled to define himself. The formerly indomitable Ex-Im bank has been vanquished, though perhaps it will return in another form; the N.S.A. has been reformed, though lightly; a “diplomatic solution” seems imminent in Iran, though of course people disagree about its effectiveness; criminal-justice reform has bipartisan momentum, though it may yet meet with resistance; politicians wishing to hamper companies like Uber are meeting stiff resistance, though they will keep trying. These are all tentative, partial, and temporary victories—but then, politics rarely offers any other kind. Rand Paul is struggling in the polls, but Paulism looks pretty healthy.

Paul could/should have easily convinced many in the GOP that he is a man of ideas and principles.  Yet, he has already fizzled away.  What gives?

The presidency is the Mahabharata of politics, an epic piece of theater for which serious stamina is required.

You have to love a sentence phrased that well, right?

That essay argues that the likes of Rand Paul never can make it:

what voters truly want are candidates with permanent front-stage personalities — people with a polished public persona, who actually believe their performing selves, to the point that they play those people even in private. Bill Clinton, for instance. He believes himself at all times, even when he’s lying, and he’s the same fellow in a stadium of 40,000 and a private card game of four. Reagan was the same way (indeed, his private self was so elusive that poor Edmund Morris had to fictionalize the biography he ultimately wrote of him, even though he’d gained unprecedented access to Reagan’s aides and diaries). Even Obama fits this definition. He's just as measured in private as in public, and just as professorial. He didn't earn the nickname "no drama Obama" for nothing. ...
If front-stage characters are whom we elect, Rand Paul, the polar opposite, would inevitably have to go.

My favorite Libertarian-Democrat public-intellectual, Camille Paglia sums it up well:

As a libertarian, I find myself agreeing with Rand Paul on so many different social and political issues. Unfortunately, however, Paul lacks gravitas as a physical presence. The U.S. presidency has a highly ceremonial aspect.  The president isn’t merely a prime minister, a political leader–he’s the symbolic embodiment of the nation. Therefore, physical attributes and vocal style are very important.  Despite the cartoons that caricature and ridicule him as a befuddled boy with big ears, Obama has always known how to handle himself as a candidate and then president. He projects a sober, unflappable confidence and presents himself with elegance and grace–all of which produced his success early on, when Hillary was the frontrunner in 2008.  Many Americans were so sick of Bush, with that lumbering cowboy stance of his.  And remember that terrible moment at a European summit when Bush came up behind the seated Angela Merkel and grabbed her by the shoulders?  She jumped out of her skin.  What an embarrassment to the nation! 

Exactly!

I am with Paglia about the Republican candidate that the liberals are not worrying enough about: Scott Walker.  Let us see if he will have the gravitas to brush off the rest.