The Buddhist perspective seems to be that we suffer from a general addiction ("craving").
Meditation is supposed to shine a light on that. Since few people ever just sit down without entertainment or work, the meditation posture becomes a way to notice (and subdue) one's constant tendency to reach for something to enjoy or accomplish.
This craving comes as part of "attachment", the way our minds are hooked up into all kinds of duties, relations, plans, hopes, fears, etc. Mental life is like swinging from branch to branch in a jungle of obligations, desires, aversions, gossip, anxieties...
In modern parlance it's the phenomenon that makes us feel constantly stressed about all kinds of stuff, in the most general sense, up to and including the end game vision that one day we're going to die, so we better get to work.
Every time I check something off my todo list, two more things appear...
Without buying into Buddhist metaphysics, I do think it points out something that's extremely palpable in these days, thus the recent (fading?) trending interest in meditation and mindfulness.
Another lucid perspective on it is McLuhan's, like in a brief essay called "The Agenbite of Outwit."
With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.
Mental health in the age of the internet indeed seems like a major topic.
Buddhist thinking does give people narratives/rituals/methods to detach, that are without doubt of great value in today's hyperconnected world. And hyper connection does make us all vulnerable indeed.
But on the other end of the spectrum, Sugata Mitra, the educator, likes to say humanity has just uncovered the ability to murmurate like starlings, thanks to the hyperconnectivity the internet enable. It's still early days and pretty chaotic and mad, but just like a crowd has some magical self organizing ability to synchronize their clapping, who knows whether this hyper connectivity is on the verge of producing the same. I'd like to think we will get there, and are just going through a temporary bumping into each other phase. The talk for anyone interested - https://youtu.be/upg8LlJZtas?t=3567
I sometimes wonder if we should just totally embrace our onlineness instead of always treating it as a failure, an addiction, a horrible alienation.
For example I remember when I was living at home, me and my brother and sometimes even my mom, we would chat on some instant messenger (or IRC) instead of talking...
That can be framed as some kind of dystopian nightmare, but it's also just two people talking using a textual medium, and why is that bad or unnatural?
What if we could have both meditation retreats and something like online immersion retreats?
What if a couple relationship can be improved by using social technology, what if that stuff doesn't only ruin our natural wholesome way of being but can instead really bring us closer and allow for whole new ways of understanding each other...
Good points. It feels like we are in some kind of "learning" phase, developing our ideas of what is useful and what is not. Who knows whether it will take 2 more years or 20 before the final verdict is delivered.
I totally agree. I think this constant need to be doing something is one of the voids that needs to be filled, and it seems to be largely cultural and driven by consumerism. Meditation is a great way to tackle that and many other voids, I regularly find myself feeling much more emotionally levelled out after having meditated successfully.
On the other hand, in some way I think the Buddhist rhetoric—probably especially in the West—can tend to exaggerate in making it seem like the original sin.
Which it probably is if you're striving for the kind of nirvana that Buddhist monks strive for...
But "laypeople" shouldn't get meta-anxious about it and try to achieve a mental peace that's impossible in their life situation.
Even in Zen they have the saying "no work, no eat."
But yeah, maybe we spend 98% of our waking life in attachment, when a better ratio would be, say, 80%?
And the insidious thing about "tech" is that it's constantly available. It's almost like having a schizophrenic voice in your head that interrupts every quiet moment.
I think everyone has their own little ways of getting some daily quietude, but I do also think that with the current state of advanced distraction technologies, it's not rare for someone to spend a whole day "online."
Meditation is supposed to shine a light on that. Since few people ever just sit down without entertainment or work, the meditation posture becomes a way to notice (and subdue) one's constant tendency to reach for something to enjoy or accomplish.
This craving comes as part of "attachment", the way our minds are hooked up into all kinds of duties, relations, plans, hopes, fears, etc. Mental life is like swinging from branch to branch in a jungle of obligations, desires, aversions, gossip, anxieties...
In modern parlance it's the phenomenon that makes us feel constantly stressed about all kinds of stuff, in the most general sense, up to and including the end game vision that one day we're going to die, so we better get to work.
Every time I check something off my todo list, two more things appear...
Without buying into Buddhist metaphysics, I do think it points out something that's extremely palpable in these days, thus the recent (fading?) trending interest in meditation and mindfulness.
Another lucid perspective on it is McLuhan's, like in a brief essay called "The Agenbite of Outwit."
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...
With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.
Mental health in the age of the internet indeed seems like a major topic.