Deer live fairly simple lives. They eat, they have babies, they get sick, they age, they get eaten by other animals. They live fairly short, simple, lives, but also, from our perspective, difficult, futile, insecure, and relatively meaningless lives. What makes deer able to live these lives of the constant search for food and temporary avoidance of death? What makes them able to stand it and not collapse from fear or depression or ennui? Well, simply put, they don’t have to think about it. They’re only aware of what’s in front of them, the immediate needs, dangers, pleasures, risks, and goals.

There’s a scene in the movie Men in Black where agent K criticizes agent J for making a scene, causing mahem and destruction by firing his weapon openly in the public pursuit of their quarry. Agent J reminds K that the world is at stake, and K tells him that the world is always at stake. There’s always some huge threat looming over humanity and threatening to destroy it, and what let’s the world keep running, what lets people go about their lives (which provides the stability needed so the Men in Black can even exist to confront these threats) is that they do not know about it.

That’s the burden of consciousness in action. The truth is, there are so many challenges and dangers in the world that any one person seeing them all clearly would be immediately overwhelmed. There’s no way one person can fix all that, and there’s no way one person can even contain it in their minds and not be completely mentally and emotionally overcome. We’re just not designed for such a burden.

There are a few ways we handle this problem. One solution is to outsource the problem to other people. As a child, I was always amused reading my comic books when Uncle Scrooge would pay Donald Duck to worry for him. Scrooge would expect Donald to moan and groan and tear out his hair, so Scrooge could sit calmly and get his work done. It’s a hilarious picture, but it’s not that different from what we actually do. We specialize, we hand off tasks to people who can focus on those problems so we can focus on our own. We distribute the psychic burden of life and all its dangers across the spectrum of human experience and ability (and some people are indeed much better at facing and solving certain kinds of problems than other people).

We also outsource a lot of our concerns to impersonal forces. God, the universe, the free market, karma, however you conceive of those laws that govern the way the world is structured. Those laws of justice will ensure that, generally, bad ideas and actions will fail and die and good ones will prosper; conscientiousness will lead to success, foolishness will be revealed in its own failure. Basically, the scales of cosmic justice will operate and good and evil will receive their just rewards. Mostly. At a macrocosmic scale. There will be some sense to the universe, some sense and logic to what actions lead to what ends. The world won’t be completely arbitrary and unjust.

Because, if the world is completely arbitrary and unjust, then there’s really no point in bearing the burden of consciousness. It has no benefit, because knowing our situation doesn’t grant us any control over it or understanding of it we can use. It merely allows us to see the senselessness and helplessness and injustice and random arbitrariness of our situation. If, indeed the world is fundamentally random and meaningless, it would be far better to be like a deer and at least not be aware of it, so we can keep our focus on the only level that actually matters: the immediate.

So, let’s assume for now that life and the universe aren’t just a cruel, senseless joke. Because if they are, there isn’t really anywhere to go. So how, then, do we manage the portion of the burden of consciousness that it is our part to bear? And what is it? These are very relevant questions that people have actually thought about a lot over the years and have developed different solutions for.

Government and the law are two of our main instruments for dealing with the existential burdens of life. We don’t carry the burden of maintaining justice, frontier-style, in our own personal lives. We don’t have to all carry swords or guns on our hips or defend our borders daily with personal violence and force. And in our big, complex world, it would be pretty hard to do do it in way that effectively recognizes and responds to every danger and need the world contains.

As much as we like the idea of the lone gunslinger brining justice and order to the world, the actual world is so big and so complex and the ways it needs to be dealt with are so varied and complex that it’s just not practical. It’s too much to expect of any one person. So we create institutions, structures, laws, and we choose people who can specialize in administering and enforcing various parts of those laws and the separate jobs and stages needed to make them work, and we trust those structures and people to do their job so we can get on with ours.

And hopefully that all works and we have good laws that are well designed to map on to reality and provide mechanisms to respond to the needs and problems that arise. And hopefully we have people in those jobs that are well suited in their abilities to see and deal with those challenges. That’s how you get a good, functioning society, one that makes it easier for all of its citizens to bear the burden of consciousness and allows us to maximize our potential. We each contribute according to our abilities and strengths and we’re protected in our weaknesses and blind spots by the strengths and insight of others.

In the old days, people had to bear a much larger total share of the burden of consciousness by themselves. Sometimes that even meant a completely solipsistic existence, of lone humans alone bearing the weight of the world. But the smallest fundamental unit where we came together to share and distribute those burdens was, of course, the family. Pioneers basically had to be their own government, their own town, their own police, their own education system, their own social and healthcare system, their own army. They were much more on their own and had to provide for themselves.

And that meant it took a lot of work and time and effort to accomplish things, because you had to do and be everything. Maybe you had one person to compliment you and help take some of the burdens off you and balance their strengths with yours in mutual protection and relief. That may not sound like a lot, but even the power of the smallest human society shouldn’t be underestimated. Those tiny societies, those families and little clusters of settlers and little villages kept us alive and growing and ultimately built the whole world we now enjoy.

And we have great respect for those people (or should) because they were able to do such a thing. Each family was like a city unto itself. Each settlement was like a country unto itself. What they accomplished, considering how much they had to handle, is amazing. But they did have one big advantage on their side. The total scale of problems they were aware of or concerned with or responding to was relatively small. They had to be everything to everyone, but fortunately “everyone” in this case meant just the six people in their own family, or the ten families in their settlement. And the bigger the community got, the less they had to be everything.

So, a kind of law of human consciousness emerges. The larger and more spaced out the group, the more narrow the focus of our consciousness becomes. The smaller and closer the group, the wider the focus of our consciousness becomes. Our mind works like a camera lens, getting wider but with a shallower depth of focus for a detailed look at things close up. For larger numbers of objects more widely spread, the depth of of the lens expands, but the area of focus narrows. Get a camera with a zoom lens out and play with it a bit and you’ll see what I mean. Pioneers live with their minds set on a portrait lens or macro setting, whereas a modern white collar worker might be thinking more like a telephoto. Our minds, much like our eyes, just seem to be built to adapt their focus in this way. You would need a pretty amazing camera to be able to take in a wide and narrowly detailed view of infinite focus at the same time. And most of us are really just average consumer models and aren’t built to process so much data.

So humans minds naturally adjust their focus and field of view just like camera lenses, and this helps us live and adjust to the needs of life and our own limitations and situation. In small groups where burdens cannot be easily shared, we take a wide angle view of the world with a shallow or narrow focus. In large groups where burdens can be easily shared, we take a narrow angle of view with a long depth of focus. This also means there are two intersections where things can easily start to go wrong and become a problem for creatures like us. Small group/narrow angle, and large group/wide angle. Basically, that’s like trying to take your family photos from six feet away with a telephoto lens, or trying to take detailed shots of distant landscapes with a macro lens.

I think the dangers of small group/narrow angle are fairly well understood, because the consequences are obvious and fairly immediate. If you’re a pioneer you take a fairly narrow and limited view of what you need to worry about and do, you’re going to get in trouble fast. If you only concern yourself with food, or protection, or family, or building a house, if you focus on just one of those things and ignore the others, things will collapse pretty quickly. People have many needs, and you need to be addressing all of them and keeping them all in mind and balance.

It’s no good having plenty of water if you freeze to death. It’s no good having lots of children if you can’t feed them. A strong house isn’t very useful if you don’t get your crops planted. And if you’re spending lots of time thinking about distant things related to one of those needs, like the general agricultural conditions and spending half your time working on techniques to adapt to them, meanwhile your house is crumbling and there are wolves circling and you haven’t got any blankets or medicine and no one is watching the kids or teaching them how to take care of themselves, then your not spending your time well or applying your focus and efforts properly, and you’re headed for swift disaster. I think most people can see that and know that fairly intuitively. “Have some sense of proportion! Get some perspective! That’s not what we need to focus on right now!” are all common corrections to that approach. Adjust your lens, is basically what they mean.

Where the dangers and weaknesses are much harder to see if at the other extreme, at the level of large group/wide angle. And before I get into this, it’s worth mentioning that there are challenges at every level. Just because it’s a necessary adaptation to develop a wider mental focus if you’re in a very small society and you’re able to develop a narrower focus in a large one doesn’t mean it isn’t still work, that it isn’t hard and does come with risks and problems.

Having to be everything at once in a small society dilutes our abilities and attention and forces us to address problems we might be poorly suited at solving. And the tendency to silo ourselves in a large society means we might lose sight of concerns outside our specialized viewpoint that we really should be more aware of or contributing to. Yes, there are great opportunities to either broaden our skill set or hone our skill set (and selves) in either situation, but even those opportunities come with costs, namely, what you lose at the other end. If you specialize too much you risk becoming too narrow. If you broaden too much you risk becoming too diffused.

And so life becomes a kind of balancing act, taking advantage of the chance to hone and focus our skill set and personality and set aside some of the broader spectrum of the burden of consciousness so we can dig deeper into our strongest niche, while also remembering that the rest of the spectrum of consciousness is still out there, and not becoming so focused on our area that we become blind and helpless in those other areas, remembering to broaden our skills and expand ourselves or at least respect the perspectives and contributions of others. Life becomes a constant push and pull between focus and balance, and somehow we need to find a way to make use of the benefits of both while acknowledging that our own limitations as humans mean we’re going to struggle anywhere in between those extremes.

OK, now let’s return to the area that I mentioned before. A large group situation combined with a wide angle and shallow depth of field. Using a portrait approach to telephoto photography. The problem is, the world contains so much information that we just can’t take it all in and respond properly to it. We can’t process it intellectually or emotionally. So we have built in filters and selective mental structures that tell us what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and select available information based on how it fits into and is relevant to our existing mental schema (basically, our internal story and values, what matters to us). Some of this is innate, some of it is encultured, and some of it is down to our individual personality.

My first daughter, when she was a baby, was so interested in people (and still is, they’re all that matters to her). She would look right in your eyes constantly and watch you all the time and would become terribly upset if she couldn’t see anyone. That was fun, but she was also a lot of work because she was so needy. She had almost no interest in toys or objects or exploring places. So she needed constant attention and interaction. Objects that weren’t people barely even existed for her. Places that didn’t have people in them held no interest.

My second daughter was quite different. It was hard to get her to meet your eye, she was often distracted by other things. She could be quite happy for long periods of time just staring at the world or digging her hands in the dirt or listening to music. You could drive around in the car and forget she was even there. You could never do that with my older daughter. From the moment they were born, they were processing information differently. They were assigning different values to different types of things, different types of information, and they responded to them differently. And they each have developed unique strengths and weaknesses and needs and desires and insights and abilties as a result. They often have a hard time understanding each other because they see and want such different things, but they’re also a wonderful compliment to one another. If if they can ever learn to properly understand and appreciate the other, they’ll have learned a really great skill and gained some real wisdom that will make them bigger than they were.

This kind of filtering is a necessary and innate part of the human mind. Everyone is filtering the world through the lenses of human perception, of their culture, and of their personality. We’re all doing it all the time. We have to do it. In fact one of the hardest things in developing AI and robotics has proved to be teaching them what information is relevant and what to pay attention to, and the realization that most of that process is defined by the meaning and purpose and goals that they were designed to pursue. They have to be taught to filter information according to their goals and needs.

Now, in our modern world we’ve come with some very interesting inventions. The internet, social media, newspapers, television. All of them are essentially information collectors and distributors. And they have an enormous reach. They’re able to gather information for us from the far corners of our world and deliver it to our lap. And because they’re so pervasive, they can wrap themselves around us so they define and filter our whole world for us. The rise of targeted and entertainment news, editorial news, papers and websites and groups and TV shows that cater specifically to our tastes, wraps us in an expansive world of fairly unitary focus and dimension.

At the same time, technology and lifestyle flexibility have allowed us to silo ourselves more and more effectively. They’ve also given us means of communication and action that remove us at a far distance from the people and events we hear about and respond to, the results of the actions we take, the dangers we hear about, the reactions of people we have affected, and the results and resolutions of the problems we concern ourselves with. The internet allows us to gather a selection of the juiciest and most provocative news from across a nation of 350 million people and funnel that direct to our individual doors. And it lets us shoot off comments and reactions to those events back to those people and many other people who we will never meet or know or likely have anything to do with. And we don’t have to see their faces, maintain a working relationship with them, or even have anything to do with them ever again, because they’re just names in a ladder of text.

What has been the result of such changes? Well, never mind how, but it seems to have made us much more partisan. It’s made us less able to understand or trust one another. It’s made us ruder and less civil and more easily angered. It’s also greatly raised our perception of threats. Outrage and fear and self-righteousness and violent resistance and incredulity at the idiocy of others are the prevailing emotional states. And yes, there are many reasons, but I think at least some of them (or the reasons for why the results have been so exaggerated) are structural. They’re because the way society is arranged now is at opposites to how we naturally process information, adjust our perspective, and assess needs and threats.

Human beings seem to have been designed to process information and respond to needs and threats and goals at a level of about 150 people. That seems to be the natural maximum size for a meaningful human community. There are only so many relationships of any depth you can maintain, only so many connections you can effective manage. Once you get past that level, your interactions are governed more by social structures and impersonal forces than any actual personal community. That’s about as much as a person can handle.

And so much of our communication is based around subtleties. Tone of voice, facial expressions, body language. Our faces and bodies are communication machines. They help tell our story, they humanize us to one another. And there’s also a very different social environment that exists when you actually know and have to live with someone in person, in the same physical space, and even more when you have to learn to live with one another (and maybe even occasionally need one another, one of the hallmarks of community in the shared-psychic-burdens model) long term. There are certain ways you can’t treat people in your own house or your community. You can’t expect the relationship to last or prosper if you don’t treat them with a certain amount of respect and understanding.

And proximity helps us achieve that positive social goal. We see people up close, in detail, as humans. We get a close-focus view of them that tempers how we treat them as representatives of our large-group, long-view personal perspectives. I might be a liberal who dislikes and disagrees with conservatives, but I know the guy who works at the lighting store, and although he’s part of that large, long-view group, I know him as a person, close up, eith a plethora of other tiny details that humanize and complexity him, and we have a good working relationship and respect for one another partly because our relationship with one another is not merely limited to my knowledge of how we differ in this one area. We can learn to appreciate each other’s viewpoints and see one another as actual, sympathetic humans that might have good aspects to them and good thoughts and motivations beyond what my wide, shallow assessment of the greater group indicates.

The truth is, it’s not clear that people were really meant to have their threat assessment reactions be the result of exceptional gleaning from a massive group of extremely distant and diverse people and situations, of which all you will ever know is likely to be the bit of editorialized information fed to you from a distance by a media outlet that profits in terms of clicks by feeding you the most provocative and alarming and outrageous material possible, framed to make it as compelling and necessary for you to read as possible, to speak to you in a unitary and simplified manner without all the complexity and extra information and relationships that make personal interactions so different.

It’s not clear that we were really meant to get our idea of people from an enveloping shroud of distant electronic information, instead of from real life encounters with people and places and situations that directly intersect our own lives. Not that it isn’t good to know about and touch a wider world, but we’ve fairly effective subverted the natural structure of how we encounter the world through technology. We live inside worlds of our own creation and curation. All our content is carefully selected by algorithms to perfectly match our desires and impulses and reinforce our ideas and prejudices, preferences, identity, and concerns.

In a time before the specialization of media, we had to share our sources. We had to share a small number of TV channels and newspapers, and we largely had to live inside the world as we daily encountered it in our own lives in our own communities. We saw the problems and the needs and took action within our own close, personal family and neighborhoods and town, within our own personal lives. Being forced to share resources meant we had to be less partisan, we had to strive to be neutral and unbiased. Because if your local media outlet wasn’t at least relatively neutral, they would lose half their audience. And the focus of media was more on a detailed reporting of local events and issues and a much smaller focus on the long view of far away national affairs.

But now we don’t need that. We can feel (incorrectly, in my opinion) that we’re really living in a quite different world from the place we actually physically live in, that we’re citizens of a more rarified community that represents us and validates us and supports us and understands us more clearly than the pedestrian rabble that surround us in the more banal sense. We see ourselves as living in the world of the specialized cultural narrative, the long view narrow angle of liberalism or conservatism or some other ism, or some idea of the international stage (whether or not we actually meaningfully know or spend and any real time with people in other countries), some idea of a community that doesn’t overlap with the physical community we live in (or maybe it does, if we’ve siloed ourselves effectively enough).

And this, I think, is part of the structural problem that is driving the unfortunate results we’ve been seeing lately. It’s a kind of alienation. Alienation from the intimacy and complexity and immediacy of real human community. It’s not good for us to be able to slaf off other people or treat them like garbage or like enemies online and not have to worry about any social consequences. I’ve often had to tell my girls, you can’t say things like that to people in real life and still expect to be able to be friends with them or work with them. We need politeness, we need standards, we need there to be consequences for certain kinds of antisocial behavior. We need to be lodged in communities that support that kind of correction to our own excesses. It’s good for us to have to be polite to people different from us so we can work side by side with them. It’s good to see the look on people’s face when we treat them well and the look on their faces when we don’t. It’s good to know about the fears and dangers that really are close to you and the things that need to be done. And since we only have so much emotional bandwidth and mental and physical energy, it’s good if we can avoid wasting too much of it on distorted perceptions of danger and action that needs to be taken on things that are far off, beyond our ability to meaningfully understand or judge or solve, things outside our actual lives.

Now, having said that, I need to make it clear that I’m not saying those long view things aren’t important. The problem is the distortion. The problem is the approach. Remember, the lens of our mind operates best along a curve of small group/wide angle to large group/narrow angle. The further you want to see clearly, the more you have to narrow your view. And we need people who can do that in a big, complex, interconnected world. But when that’s the main way we start to perceive and experience and react emotionally to the proximate, immediate, close up world, that’s going to seriously mess with our perspective.

It’s been shown fairly well that people’s instincts and understandings of statistics and threats and data are often unreliable when applied to large scale issues. The Science of Fear is a very interesting book on this subject. It concerns itself quite a bit with the way that our mixture of access to long-view, isolated facts, divorced from actual expertise and experience, combined with emotional reactions tuned for close-in experience (our brain interprets information about threats as if they were proximate to us, even if they aren’t), results in us drawing lots of wrong conclusions. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I singled out threats as an area of concern simply because they make easy examples (people respond so easily to outrage and fear, far more easily than to almost anything else, which has also been demonstrated; outrage is fundamentally viral, it spreads like a virulent disease), but the distortion operates on many levels in many different ways. It affects our reactions, positive and negative, how we value and prioritize and react to all kinds of information.

There’s a lovely kind of seduction to slipping the bounds of the lenses of human perception. It makes us feel like a god in our world. It gives us a lovely kind of distance and superiority in our immediate life. It let’s us reduce the wide world of immediate experience to a narrow peephole of perspective. It let’s us expand our shallow view of our immediate, myopic experience to cover all the farthest reaches of existence. It lets us see the near world so narrowly we don’t have to see anything that doesn’t fit our long lens of personal perspective. It less us see the vast, wide world so shallowly and myopically that we can’t make out anything that doesn’t fit our immediate perspective. In btih cases, we see a world that fits neatly into our own limited personal perspective and demands little from us except what our instincts naturally desire to see. It’s very self-affirming. It makes the bounds of the world the same as those of our own tempermental viewpoint.

I think an interesting modern example of the problems we can encounter applying the lens of human perspective to the vast world of information is the Coronavirus. Every day we’re absolutely bombarded with information about it. Statistics about infections and deaths are reported daily like football scores. And it is freaking people the freak out. It’s incredible stressful. People’s entire immediate experiences consist of a constant drumbeat of huge, world-spanning statistics and warnings of vast existential danger that they themselves have little experience of or efficacy toward. For some people, the virus is part of their immediate experience, and they’re dealing with it immediately, as an actual problem they or someone they know has, and they can see what the dangers are and know what they need to do to deal with it. And at the other end there are genuine experts whose specialized job is to deal with large scale issues like this and have real knowledge and efficacy in this situation.

But most of us are stuck in some in-between stage, surrounded by vast oceans of information and warnings about things we have little actual knowledge about and virtually no clear efficacy toward. In fact our day to day experience might largely contradict the narrative we’re concerned about. So we’ll most likely just start overwriting our interpretation of our experience in terms of the narrative. Our fear and anxiety reactions, that are meant to spur us toward action to respond to or avoid or remove the threat keep building and building and don’t know where to go or what to do with themselves. They become unproductive, even counterproductive. They cause us to turn on one another. Fearing a vast nebulous enemy, we fee a need to confront it, and if it’s not clear how to do that, we’ll find a way. We’ll find something or someone to stand in. It is a fact of human psychology that if you keep telling people “be afraid, be afraid, someone is out to get you”, eventually we’ll start to believe it, and if we can’t easily find the person we fear, we’ll just find them anyway in someone or something around us. Fear is fundamentally actionable. And if the proper action to resolve it isn’t clear, we’ll just find the best outlet or substitute we can.

There’s a funny psychological phenomenon called “concept creep”. Basically, what it means is that if you tell someone they need to find something, and you make it hard for them to find, they’ll just loosen and adjust their definitions of the thing they’re looking for until they can find it. If you tell people to find purple colored dots on a page of dots and then gradually over time keep reducing the number of purple dots, people will just start loosening their idea of what qualifies as purple. So long as the motivation to find the dots is compelling enough, most people will be quite happy to start calling blue purple, if it helps them find what they need to find. And fear is a great motivator. Concept creep is a problem of proximity and perspective and information processing that is deeply entangled with the issues we’ve been talking about here.

Psychologists have noted a large amount of concept creep in our social language lately. Terms that used to be very specific and restricted, especially terms describing threats and dangers and injuries, have gradually crept outside their former boundaries. Statistically, the world is far safer than it ever has been, yet out perception of the world is quite the opposite. We’ve got all these threat-seeking systems, but no clear, proximate external threats to direct them toward. But that doesn’t stop us from fidning threats to confront. We’ll just find them within the set of experiences we have.

That’s not to say that there aren’t real threats, both near and far, but to argue that our approach to them and the social results were seeing are clearly suffering from a certain amount of distortion. Our increasingly tribal approach to evils is also complimented by an increasingly tribal approach to goods. We assess long-view goods with a shallow consideration. We fail to criticize and judge with a clearer, more personal eye things and people that, in our immediate life, would fail our test of good behavior. We ignore things we should notice because they fall outside our long-view narrative window. We selectively pick out a narrow range of features from a far vaster sea of details because they fit our shallow focus. We let our positive value system be subverted and distorted by the same myopic landscapes and telescopic portraits that were distorting our negative value system.

This is probably the point where I should admit that I’ve got a serious perspective problem myself. My problem is that I try to do it all. I see all near points as lines extending off into the far distance. I want to follow every personal detail to it’s furthest horizons of abstract embodiment. What this means is that I easily get lost in the abstract and in the interconnectiveness of everything and completely lose sight of the really meaty personal details that actually connect to people in their actual lives. Now that I’ve arrived at this late point about Coronavirus, I remember that my whole point, the spark of my original idea, was just a few thoughts about how the way we’re experiencing reporting on Coronavirus is having some bad effects on our feelings and outlook, in part because of the weird structural peculiarities of modern life and media. But in order to explain anything I seem to feel like I have to explain everything. In order to make my point I have to establish all the background knowledge and arguments that led to and support and define my point. Maybe this is the fault of my philosophical training, maybe it’s just who I am.

But look at all the crazy feelings and behaviors and actions of people in Colorado Springs. Hoarding, anxiety, fear of even approaching or talking to others, fear of even going outside, feelings of stress and helplessness. You would think we were in the grip of the apocalypse. But the truth is, almost all of it is in our heads, not in our actual lived experience. I don’t know a single person who actually has Covid, much less anyone struggling to overcome it. This is a town of half a million people, and the amount of people who actually have it could fit in a single decent-sized meeting room. The amount that have gotten seriously ill and died is even smaller. You could fit them on a single couch. That’s not to belittle the value of those lives. The disconnect it between the our apparent perception of how pervasive the experience of threat is and how pervasive the experience of threat actually is. And since so many of us are experiencing such pervasive intellectual experience of threat, but aren’t directly connected to it in our actual lives, but we’ve still got these actionable fear responses in us, we’re going a bit cray cray. We have to find some way to express and deal with and confront the threats that our information I puts are telling us constantly are all around us, crouching right at our door! And if we can’t find a useful, focused, practical, immediate outlet, we’ll just find whatever outlet we can. We’ll start calling 911 to report our neighbors playing in their yards. We’ll buy up stacks of toilet paper we don’t really need to prepare for a supply shortage that never existed (until we crated it by artificially driving up demand). We’ll stress out and snap at each other and criticize each other for minor acts of minimal risk. We’ll criticize every step, every word, every action, every press release, every social media post. Our actionable fear reactions are stoked up and we need to work them out. (And how much of the vitriol on social media in general is just an expression of this same cycle, over different existential threats? ) None of this means that Corona is real. It is. But there’s a misalignment between our perception, our experience, and our course of action.

Note 1. I think it’s worth emphasizing that everything is a matter of degree. I grew up in a small town with a more limited options. So I loved the connections to other minds I found in books. I remember telling my sister that Dorothy L Sayers seemed like as good a friend to me through her writing as any of my friends in life. And she told me that was pretty pathetic.

I find it amusing to reflect on, and in a way I understand what she meant. She was very friendly and popular and sociable, and I was a bit odd and often bullied and had a hard time fitting in. Not that I felt any lack of friendship, I just found a lot of value in those thought peers that were hard to find in real life. So I understand the value and the attraction ability of modern technologyans it’s ability to connect us to our thought peers, those of like mind. It is nice.

I think the problem, as I said I think it’s a matter of degree. Alienation occurs because we go too far. We silo ourselves and surround ourselves in our thought bubbles to the detriment of a larger practical and experiential world of which we are, in fact, a part. Most of aren’t monks living in isolation on mountaintoos with no options to connect except through social media and the internet. Most of us live in a country, city, neighborhood, and even family with a lot of different people very close by who share our space and connect to our lives, and whose visibility, investment, and influence suffer when we mentally dislocate ourselves to more ratified thought communities. I think both they and us lose something because of how far we’ve taken things (and how easy it is to take it farther than we should).

It’s wonderful to be able to taste rarities gathered for our gastronomic pleasure from the far corners of the earth. But if we make that the basis of our diet, the foundation of what we live on, instead of living off what actually grows in the land that we live upon, that’s going to cause some long term problems, complications, and distortions for us, for the environment, for the global economy and supply chain, for the people we source those delicacies from, for the producers who live near us. I’m not saying that it can’t be done or even shouldn’t be done. Can’t is obviously water under the bridge in our modern world. Should, as I said, is more a question of degree. It’s a lovely thing to be able to enjoy, to a certain degree. But there’s a point in the progression where it begins to become structurally problematic.

The world, and ourselves, weren’t meant to work that way. It creates vulnerabilities and distortions, it creates weak points and an unrealistic picture of what the world around us is. And it’s not clear that everyone getting exactly what they want, all the time, is actually as utopian as it sounds. It’s not clear that it’s actually good for us.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Vitamins are good for you, and important. But they seem to really be the most beneficial when you can get them naturally, through your food, rather than through artificial supplementation. And it’s far easier to get way too much by taking supplements, at which point it appears they actually harm your health outcomes rather than helping them.

People tend to think in simple terms, like a dog or a child. This is good, so more of a good thing, maybe even all of a good thing, must be even better. Obesity is obviously one clear ubiquitous modern problem that disproves that theory. But it’s true even on a microcosmic level. Toxicity, as any good scientist can tell you, isn’t about identity, it’d about dosage. You need salt and water and a thousand other things to live, some in large amounts, some in very small amounts. And virtually of them, even the most obviously healthy and desirable, are toxic if taken in sufficiently large dosages. So many of the things that make life work are like that. In low enough doses even poisons can be harmless, at the right dose all kinds of things are beneficial, in high enough doses even the best things can sicken or kill you.

Modern media is the vitamin supplement version of human interaction. It gives you concentrated, simplified doses of the things you want, without having to wade through all that extra stuff and track down those hard to find nutrients you need. But actually trying to live off a diet that gets the majority of its content from supplements is a distortion of how humans were meant to feed themselves. It’s like the 1950s vision of getting all your nutritional needs from a single pill. It’s a nice idea, in a way. For starving people it might be a useful temporary remedy. But in the long term, for normal, healthy people, it’s not how humans were made to survive, and trying to live off a chemical diet is going to have some unanticipated complications (and in practice, does).

One of my dad’s own patients almost died from a vitamin overdose. She was taking huge amounts of supplements, most of which her body could eliminate, but some of which built up in her system until they teacher a toxic level and her organs began to shut down. She just assumed that more of a good thing couldn’t hurt her and must only be either better or neutral. Her blood had to be cleared of toxins by a machine, and those toxins were the very things she thought her good and health consisted in. If she had been forceded to eat like a normal person and get her nutrition through more natural means, by eating actual whole foods, she could never have achieved the kind of overdose she did. She could never have eaten enough in the natural way to reach those dosages. Her own body would have stopped her. But the structure of her approach removed those safeguards.

On a final note, having spent a certain amount of time reviewing different literature about personality and development and childhood and long term life outcomes, there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty and complication about what makes us who we are, today and tomorrow. There is no simple story, there are a lot of factors operating in parallel. Who we are and who we become is partly limited by our inherited nature, who we’re are born to be, and is influenced and altered and again confined or directed by our family and circumstances and culture and personal history. And one of the most powerful influences on us (one of several, but one not to be underestimated) is our peer group. Children, and indeed also adults, are enormously influenced and affected in who they become by their social peers. We are social animals. We understand and experience and define ourselves in a social context. It’s a huge part of what makes us who we are and who we become.

So what happens when you radically change the rules for the human social experience? When in the course of a few years you radically alter or remove barriers to certain kinds of communication or data gathering and response, when other rich and traditional channels of communication and experience are largely cut off in favor of just a few? What forces and influences and people are you empowering, and which are you neglecting and allowing to atrophy? What are the practical results of such a radical retooling of one of the primary influences on human nature? What are the dangers? Considering that all humans are finite in their capacities, that our faculties themselves have not been greatly altered or expanded, only their use and purview altered in their extent and selection so that we may choose more freely what we attend to, we aren’t really seeing or knowing or relating to anyone or anything more than we ever could, we just have more freedom to set our sights, our lenses, more easily at greater extremes of vision (the focus has changed but not the actual size of our viewfinder), what are we in turn neglecting and missing, and how will it affect our navigation in the world around us and how we walk through it, taking such a view? How much more carelessly might I walk among my near neighbors if I view the world around me only through binoculars? How much might I misjudge my steps and my interactions or even just ignore or misinterpret what’s around me? That’s not to say that binoculars aren’t very useful, or that certain people and jobs might be well suited for keeping watch with them. And a view through them can help us plan our steps. But should we make them the basis, the majority of our vision?

It’s an analogy, a loose one, one that doesn’t map perfectly to all circumstances. And one we shouldn’t follow too far or too slavishly. But I think it’s worth thinking about.

Powered by Journey Diary.