Becoming Invisible for a month

I’ve already almost entirely disappeared since mid-June. I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’m planning to completely vanish for all of next month.

I decided to take a few days offline back on the 15th of June. I announced my decision on Twitter, and attached a poll to see if others thought I could make it or not. Here are the results:

A 3-day stretch was easy. I grew up in the analog world, went years without a phone or TV in my college years, and didn’t get my own personal computer and an internet connection until after I got my MFA in my late 20s. I am among a handful of overlapping generations in all of human history that traverse both the analog and digital worlds. I am also now one of the historically few artists who made physical art before the advent of digital art, and made digital art before the arrival of AI art bots. That’s three eras in one lifetime: analog, digital, and now AI. People born in the new millennium live in only two of those worlds, and children born today only live in one. So, I have an advantage over younger people when it comes to disconnecting from social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc.

Three days was a relief. This is how I put it on Twitter:

It’s now been 16 days. This isn’t about breaking an addiction, not really; otherwise, it wouldn’t be so easy for me. It’s not that I was overwhelmed by the internet, nor was I sad, depressed, or anxious. It wasn’t like a break between rounds in a boxing match.

I need to mention that, technically speaking, I’m not completely offline. I use Messenger to text with my wife during work hours because I keep my phone perpetually in “airplane” mode. I’ve received fewer than five calls in the last two years, and only when those were arranged prior via email or messenger. If you don’t know, I’m also an expat living in Southeast Asia and have been for over 15 years. Despite my online presence, I’m physically about as far from the western world as you can get. I haven’t seen family in over a decade. The extent to which I’ve used the internet includes doing some work-related research online, looking up the “eel-like” creature in my brother’s pond, downloading some Qawwali music, and fielding a few wayward comments on my blog and YouTube with one-line responses. But I didn’t watch the premiere episode of the new season of Black Mirror or anything else on Netflix. Nor did I watch even one YouTube video, though I could justify viewing something like, “How to paint metal” if I need it for my art. Most importantly, no Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter interaction except for my announcements on Twitter of taking leave. Of all the venues I partake in online, I find Twitter the most counterproductive, even “toxic”.

I came up with the idea of being “invisible” to cover not engaging with the public or publicly. I consider the scant comments I responded to at all to be digressions. But I also won’t use it for watching movies or other entertainment. And part of all this is just because I want to have more focus and be less influenced, distracted, encumbered, or burdened by the minds of others. You could say I just wanna “go more Zen”. Anyone who knows anything about Zen, or Hinduism, or Eastern philosophy of choice knows that the chattering mind—what I call “the inner DJ who never shuts up”—is considered the big problem. Virtually everyone knows this by now. It’s enough for me to deal with my own inner Howard Stern, let alone everyone else’s, and social media is a platform where we almost exclusively engage on the level of linguistic thought—at worst, a chorus of screaming egos clamoring for attention, status, ranking, affirmation, validation, and even vengeance. There is a very real way in which spaces like Twitter or Reddit function to aggregate views and create a kind of consensus of opinion and belief – especially since the government got involved! – and molds a worldview that on the surface stands in for reality. So, I won’t be partaking of any of that, but will use Google chat (I now prefer it to messenger] to communicate with a select very few people, which I can’t avoid doing for circumstantial reasons I can’t reveal at this time]. I may also look up some information, which is more like going to the library, which I can’t do where I live. You get the idea.

If you know me at all, you know that I am somewhat invulnerable to popular opinion. I’m sure I’ve been seduced by it, manipulated, coerced, fooled, exploited, oppressed, and deluded. But when my own lived reality, experience, understanding, reason, instinct, and insight conflict with consensual reality and the dominant narrative, I reject what I am supposed to believe, not my own reality. In case you haven’t noticed, what we are told we must believe is becoming increasingly comically stupid. The dumber the story gets, the more rigorously it is enforced and the greater the punishments for any dissent. I don’t, of course, automatically believe the opposite of whatever “authority” is piping into our proverbial living rooms. There’s a hell of a lot of material that benefits both those running the show and those being run by the show. But in general, the biggest reason everything we’re being told we must believe is so inane is that it’s a lie. The lie reflects the real situation in which the divide between the most rich, powerful, and privileged and the rest of us has become a vast chasm. What we must believe as true is now whatever the most powerful have crafted for us presumed dummies to believe in their own selfish self-interest. That’s why it’s so stupid. They think we’re that stupid, and they cater to and construct our inanity. The reality we are fed is addictive junk food for the mind.

The “powerful” [bankrupt weaklings who’ve largely inherited the reigns of the ruling elite] are, through monumental stupidity, putting our entire species at risk of self-destruction. Nuclear war is back on the table, the evidence of climate change is on our doorsteps, we are already planning how to best instill authoritarian controls when the next somehow inevitable pandemic arrives, and AI is poised to not only supersede human intelligence and take over the majority of jobs, but it is predicted to likely end human civilization. All of these eventualities are the direct consequence of the corruption of our ruling elite class. All could and would be avoided by sane leadership that reflected the well-being of the populace in general and didn’t serve the increasingly insatiable appetite of the billionaire class and bankrupt leaders of various categories for ever more power, money, and control. It appears to be a disease of the human mind that the more astronomical our fortune, the more we are willing to sacrifice anyone and everything else to expand it. The only cure is that nobody has this kind of awesome and undeserved power over huge populations, and while “democracy” used to be our antidote, today “democracy” is a farce that is orchestrated by the ruling elite to hoodwink the public. The last vestiges of real freedom are being trampled on by a growing technocratic totalitarianism. We’ve seen the tyrants of other countries go down with their ships in recent decades, and our own tyrannical overlords will meet the same eventuality. It is in their own self interest to loosen the reigns of control to save their own lives, but alas, they are too morally weak to see it and blinded by their insatiable desire for ever more power.

What passes for “power” is largely unearned advantage, the abuse of which is weakness. We’ve been observing for generations that technology has advanced far beyond morality and ethics. There’s a simple explanation for this. Technology is inherited, and we stand on the shoulders of all the giants who have come before, but morality has to be practiced and understood on an individual level within each lifetime. You can no more inherit ethical behavior than you can a physically fit body or athletic achievement. The result is that people with the morality of schoolchildren wield the power of our entire history of technological development. It requires hard work and humility to make genuine scientific progress, but to use the applied science for personal gain requires only B-grade intelligence and a lamentable aptitude to disregard the real harm one’s actions have on the world [see AI, prescription medicine, nuclear weapons…].

It should be obvious why I wouldn’t want to adopt either the beliefs they’ve constructed for me to adopt OR ELSE! or their own if I had access to them. Machiavelli, for one, disgusts me. And I suspect, though I shouldn’t be that open about this, but I suspect the common thread of all the religions and wisdom traditions that saw us through centuries of existence reflects actual reality, namely this: you have a soul, death is not the end, and you will be judged. As silly as that may seem on the face of it, and hopelessly backward, sometimes the most simple-minded subjective feeling and the most profound objective analyses meet at the same conclusion. Take it all as a metaphor for something we don’t quite understand, but no, life is not just a cruel contest to see who can be the most brutal and calculating. It is not a “dog-eat-dog” world. Pandas eat bamboo, and save for the occasional insect, gorillas are exclusively vegan. The people who tell us “it’s a dog-eat-dog world” are cannibalistic exploiters of other humans trying to justify their own moral and spiritual shortcomings as merely reflecting unquestionable natural facts. Of course I don’t say death not being final, us having “souls”, and us being judged are FACTS! It’s on some other level to do with how we orient ourselves to existence.

For example, what would it feel like to have a soul? It would feel exactly like it does to have a conscious mind, which, as I like to point out, science can’t find. The one irreducible, incontestable subjective truth—”I think therefore I am”, which is the subjective experience of self-awareness—is not provable at all by science. If science can’t even find consciousness, which we know absolutely exists, then there may be a lot more to reality that is beyond our current objective scope. And in the same way we are confident no other species we are aware of has an inkling of our understanding of the operations of the universe, our own human understanding may also be dramatically limited. Consciousness is a stunning example of how we can subjectively know things that science can’t prove, and so I wonder if thousands of years of human beliefs were entirely unfounded. Isn’t it a bit easy to only believe what objectivity and technological instruments can define?

You may be muttering something about religion being the reasons behind more wars than anything else, or that it’s naïve and fearful to question the inexorability of death. Sure, sure, that’s what I said in my late teens, too. Let’s not judge the past only by the flaws of our ancestors, and keep in mind that ending civilization trumps all the religious wars combined. Meanwhile a religious war goes against the fundamental ideas of the wisdom traditions. Rather, look at it this way. It is naïve to think you can get away with murder.

Which reminds me. I’m about 70% finished with this book, which revolves around a murder or two.

I’m withholding judgment until I’ve completed it. At one point I lost interest in it, but then I picked it up again, and now I am having trouble putting it down. As it happens, what is transpiring on the pages I’m currently turning is whether or not those responsible for the murder—and they are the protagonists, so we are voting for them—will get away with the murders or not.

Our world functions as if not only can you get away with murder, but murderers such as those who are “masters of war” are the most richly rewarded and celebrated among us. Somehow, sending other people’s lives to the “roaring slaughter” serves as a celebration of life for those behind the barbaric and malicious, self-serving cruelty. But that is not reality. Anyone who would undermine another, let alone execute them, for their own self-aggrandizement has missed the point of life, and as Socrates articulated, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Let’s not forget that Socrates was sentenced to drink the hemlock because he “corrupted the youth of Athens”. Galileo was sentenced by the Inquisition to house arrest for the remainder of his life for his “foolish” and “heretical” science. But, no, let’s not smear Christ with the sins of the Inquisition—a mental sleight of hand that brands him with the crime of his own torture and murder.

It’s a sick feature of our reality that those who have the least appreciation of life are often the A-holes in charge. A cruel indifference to the plight of others is the red carpet leading to power. And I had a very strange realization one day. Only the “witch” being burned at the stake knows the reality that the inquisitors and “peanut munching” crowd do not. Not only does she know that she is innocent and that the purveyors of ultimate good are themselves perversely evil, but only she knows the horrible reality of the experience of being burned alive and the transcendence thereof. Only the person who is maligned, brutalized, humiliated, and ultimately extinguished in this situation possesses the full scope of the truth. Many today are falling on the battlefield, being sacrificed to cruel, implacable injustice. Meanwhile, the most vile, who are behind the killings, present themselves to us as the most virtuous. Do we allow the brutes among us to decide for us what the meaning of life is?

As scientist Werner Heisenberg put it, “Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think”. While I readily concede that it is scientifically highly unlikely that death is not the end, that we have souls, or that there is any kind of universal and absolutely fair judgment we might ever face—I could make cutting and insulting arguments, with evidence, against any such soft-minded beliefs myself—the nature of reality on a deeper level than we can prove with our current instruments may make those things metaphorically true, and wouldn’t we behave less selfishly if we believed it? This is not an appeal to religion or belief structures. It’s a humble acknowledgement that reality may be a lot bigger than “the selfish gene”, survival of the fittest, or any other bland conclusion that amounts to acquiescence to the triumph of evil. Rather than discount the past and our own ancestors entirely in a vapid kind of perennial adolescent rebellion that automatically makes any idiot stumbling down the street today superior to all who came before, we might do a hell of a lot better to assume they knew a thing or two about a thing or two, in which case we could do a lot to learn from those who are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from ourselves but who lived in much less pampered times. Just imagine what hardships they had to endure in order to survive as compared to us. True knowledge of life is not just being privy to correct facts; it is an understanding that either can’t be put into words or is perceived as a whole that is greater than the sum of the words. And this is another reason an analog vacation makes sense, as well as what follows. 

I AM reading literature. I just finished this book.

An absolutely outstanding read. Hey, let me say THIS about literature. Andy Warhol had this observation about Coca-Cola, which is that it tastes the same no matter who you are drinking it. So, no matter how low you are on the corporate ladder you get the same experience as the CEO when you knock back a coke. Problem is that experience sucks. The same idea applies much more meaningfully to great literature (and all art]. I mean, you have to be up to appreciating the art in question, but assuming you are, you are privy to the same essential experience no matter who you are.

Before this novel, I read this one:

Sensational! I’m not going to stop to do book reviews, but this was just incredible. I probably learned more from these two books than from months of news. Let me explain a little insight I had a while back. There was a time when I only read non-fiction because, well, “truth is stranger than fiction” and I wanted to know reality, not some story. Ah, I needed to dig deeper. Authors, at their best, distill their own lived reality and the reaches of their understanding into their novels in order to share and immortalize the world they know. In so doing, they brew a distillation of their truths. In this way, in terms of subjectivity, fiction can harbor far more truth than other writing.

So, yeah, there is an element of “F your BS reality, just shut up for a few minutes and let me get my bearings” about ditching the discourse. Those who’ve read my blog for years know that I have my own views, philosophical arguments, and understanding of art and life in general. You can find articles about the purpose of art, why we have free will, what consciousness is, morality and art, AI and art, hundreds of articles of art criticism, and why I make the kind of art that I do. Maybe I prefer to grow in my own soil for a spell rather than be bombarded with a bunch of dirt clods and smothered in an avalanche of rancid offal courtesy of the powers that be.

But it’s really very positive. I’m just getting more in touch with myself, with the still waters beneath the aggravated surface, and focusing on my art, health, and wellbeing. I say that in order to be a better artist, one needs to be a better person. I believe that. Obviously, I’m not the same sort of artist as the aforementioned Andy Warhol. I have more in common with Haruki Murakami or Khaled Hosseini. Art isn’t just being clever, in fashion, or making a radical breakthrough (usually an overinflated stylistic innovation). Art isn’t mental masturbation. Art is the way that we humans communicate with each other about what it’s like, what it feels like, what it means, and how wonderful and horrible it is to be alive. No, a cynical gesture like a banana taped to a wall or a urinal tilted on its side doesn’t cut it. If an alien species came to this Earth and they happened upon works by some of our most celebrated contemporary artists, there would be nothing about the pieces to distinguish them as art. To really communicate with art, you need to have understanding and the ability to convey your inner reality. For your art to evolve, you need to evolve, and this is a never-ending process. So you can say this is me, on one level, doing some extra training to kick my art up to the next level.

I need to be online in order to share my work and make anything resembling a living, so I’ll be back in August. And this is assuming that the boat of reality will smoothly sail along for the next month and that there won’t be a nuclear war or some other catastrophe that will force me back online. So, if all is relatively stable by today’s pathetic standards, I will be an invisible man next month, at which point I should also have finished a definitive new work which I think is one of my best. Stay tuned for that reveal.

Comments are appreciated, but don’t forget that I won’t see them or approve them until August.

Peace.

[My Patrons get some exclusive content, and I may publish an update or two on Patreon – see below – during my invisible period.]

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