The Discipline of Embracing Mortality

Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to find our limits. 🛑

I'm going to describe a feeling that I know most of us will recognize quite easily, given the surroundings we inhabit. It's the feeling of pure dopamine anticipation that occurs just before you click "subscribe" on a new Youtube channel filled with videos about a brand new topic that you had never before know about or considered. The feeling of possibility, the knowledge that you've tapped a vein of novelty and the hope that this one will last, releasing you from the acedia of browsing. This feeling occurs more often for most of us than we would like to admit, and has many cousins as we discover shows, hobbies, bands, and NFTs projects. Novelty is a powerful drug, but it is one with a short half-life. Within days we often go searching again, throwing ourselves into the current of serendipity trusting that this time we will strike the motherlode.

Photo by Tyler Easton on Unsplash

Now of course not all novelty is to be avoided and boredom is not always a moral good of some kind. But I want to explore an idea that has been traveling around my brain for a few months, see what its' implications might be for human life in the age of Connectivity. I begin to wonder how powerful might we be if we could learn to close doors in our minds just as easily as we are wont to open them. As common as the joking references are online to burnout and attention overload and flipping constantly between browser tabs and Discord channels, my hunch is that we are not doing so well in this massive social experiment. And since my hunch is supremely unoriginal (less of a hunch than a statement of a decade-old acknowledged fact, really), then you'll forgive me when my thoughts on the matter are equally non-novel.

Sorry, this huge half-hour break between paragraphs is brought to you by a trip through Discord, 2 different wallet apps and Opensea to plan an NFT purchase. I'm not claiming to have executed the solution yet, just hoping to describe the problem first.

As much as we joke about our human tendency to chase novelty, it causes us suffering too. The relative cost of having trying to split our attention between browser windows is usually low. But we all have seen or perhaps experienced broken relationships, impaired finances, and damaged reputation through failures to say no to the next exciting thing. Human greed is a powerful force, able to mutate itself endlessly as it seeks ever greater satisfaction while discarding behind it a trail of our past dearest hopes like crumpled juice boxes. We are a restless people.

And for restless people in an age of noise, the quiet man and the still woman will be as gods.

I don’t need to describe the problem anymore because we all know what’s happening and we’re beginning to be anxious about our anxiety. For a people immersed in the sea of possibility, what possible rocky shore could we stand upon? The answer is often overlooked because the shore is jagged, and it lays us open when we reach it. The answer is to learn our own frailties and stop deceiving ourselves about them. The answer is to say no.

Photo by Ryan Cheng on Unsplash

Not no as in the “self-discipline, have you tried just trying harder” misery peddled by faux-spiritual gurus. I mean no as in, “I have seen my own limits as a human creature, recognized my mortality, and accepted it. So no.” No to the insane attempt to split our consciousness in hopes of transcending failure on our own. No to an unending cycle of noise in the desperate hope that satisfaction might be found by drowning out the quiet voices. No to imagining that I can cheat my nature by outrunning the slow march of years, to trying to become something other than myself by the application of my own will and power. And thus, no to the cultural idolatry of busyness, hurry, ambition, expertise, and speed.

Choose to let go of any algorithm or app that tries to hijack your sense of oughtness to demand your attention. Say yes to true rest, which is the period after a time of hard, focused work where we often do nothing productive at all and instead “waste” our time in nature, with friends, or in silent thought. Begin to close doors in your life. Hobbies you won’t feel obligated to pursue, issues you won’t research, problems you can’t solve, things you don’t actually enjoy. Allow the quiet to creep back in from the edges of your life where you’ve shoved it. Embrace the fact that you are a limited, weak being and you cannot fully experience everything life has to offer you.

This is when you’ll discover the rocks on the shore. There’s a reason so few stop the terrible ceaseless rushing and vain scrolling we all claim to hate. And that’s because for many it’s a better alternative than what they fear. Because saying no is humbling, and because we are trying to escape from the danger of our real life in our palaces of make believe pseudo pleasures. Accepting that we are brief creatures, letting go of the many dalliances to focus on the few best pursuits that will shape our lives is often a frightening choice. But if you seek the silence just long enough to let the buzzing and pinging die, if you can break through past the five-minutes’ pain to the other side…after just a moment, the voice in your head isn’t yours anymore.

Cut off some useless things. Leave space to think and to enjoy. Resist the unquestioned drive to fill each moment with decisions and press into the discomfort we’ve been carefully trained to feel in each moment of rest. If you get out into the quiet and don’t flee in fear, you might just discover the answer to struggles you were avoiding all along.

WGMI 😎

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Quietude, which some men cannot abide, because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise. ~ Charles Spurgeon

If you got quiet for a moment
And finally put your faith where your mouth is
What are you afraid you will hear
I think we're all lost till we've lived in the wilderness ~ My Epic, “Of Wilderness”