Dissociated from Nature is our Chosen Lifestyle

The lifestyle we have chosen has led us to a feeling of misery most of our times. The office CCTV camera had revealed that the staffs touch their phones every 4 mins in one observation. A study found that during peak times this number could go up to once every six or seven seconds, with some users unlocking their devices up to 900 times over the course of a day. The information was collected by Android app Locket, which monitored how many times its 150,000 users checked their phone over in a day. What people do with their phones may be personal but most attend to pings generated from social media sites, text messages and machines updates. 

In fact social media has evolved as a good respite to continue the euphoric mood and keep the miserable feeling away. I wonder often what would be the state of most of the humanity without it now. I see the social media has triggered chatting, sharing, travel frenzy, countless activities and nameless copycat actions as a pass time. Possibly social media bustle has evolved as the greatest peacetime activity in recent times. It has surely surpassed meditation in its sincerity and drugs in its addiction.  It seems to have helped calm the masses and done good to keep them pre-occupied and content. Unfortunately, though, it has not helped resolve the misery inside.

I felt the part of the reason for our misery is our dissociative relationship with the natural environment and nature. We have distanced ourselves from nature and from natural law. In simple terms we live contradicting nature to a great extent. While nature dissipates, we are hardwired to accumulate. Nature live in the present and we love our future. Nature creates for a purpose, we do the same driven for profiteering. Our lives too have changed from living in the open environment to a form of caged living, and as zoo animals we have lost the connectivity with the living world. 

Smart phones in fact evolved as one of the biggest disruptors. What it does is simply takes one away to a new world. A world of excessive and unnecessary data. Individual moves from the present state to another and then another turning, turning him as a vagabond. In fact our natural and most restive state is to be attentive and aware to our-self. This is body's defense mechanism.

Yuval Noah Harari -  a well known historian, philosopher and author of this century chose a lifestyle with  Vipassana meditation and not to own a cellphone. When asked by a reporter "Do you think it has helped you in any way? Does this make you a separate being from the rest of the species?" he answered as below:

"First, I have to say that it is a privilege today not having a mobile phone, this is a status symbol. The most powerful people don't have mobile phones. If you have a mobile phone, it means that you work for somebody, and you have to answer to your boss and your boss wants you to have a mobile phone so you have to have one. The people that work for me have a mobile phone and this gives me the kind of quiet to do my work, but somebody still keeps the mobile phone, it's not that there is no smartphone at all. 

Personally, I think that in meditation, you try to focus and focus on the really important things, focus on the reality. One of the downsides of smartphones and the internet is that they are a constant source of distractions. You try to focus, but there is a message, somebody is calling, something is popping up. The other part of the problem is that much of what distracts you is of no importance at all, that you are distracted by completely irrelevant and insignificant things. 

Today, in addition to data, an even more scarce resource than data is attention. Attention is maybe the most scarce resource in the world, and all these devices and many of the internet sites, they are built to steal your attention. It's not an accident that people who design the applications and websites are specialists in psychology, in brain science, and their specialty is to grab a hold on to people's attention. And then they take this attention and they sell it to advertisements and politicians. 

Just look at the news industry. Unfortunately, the main model today is exciting news that costs you nothing in exchange for your attention. So you have these crazy titles that grab your attention and sell it to everybody else. I think we need to work very hard to switch to a different model of the news industry. Because attention is what's the most important resource now, it would make much more sense to pay money for high-quality information which protects your attention. I think it's crazy that people would pay a lot of money for good food or a good car but they won't spend any for high-quality information."* 

We may not practice meditation and may possess a smartphone, but the truth is we can still manage  ourselves well. We just have to bring back "focus" into our life. 

* https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2018/07/20/yuval-noah-harari-21-lessons-from-data-meditation-to-ai-and-black-mirror.html