InFauxMation Overload

Everyone experiences a sense of not having enough
time to do what they need or want, being stressed out
from trying to keep up with all the demands on them, and
feeling whelmed and run down from their constantly
hectic schedule.

Part of this stress is from being tapped into too much,
connected to and reacting to everyone else's stuff.
Social media does not need to be on all the time; we
don't have to use it merely because it exists.

It has become a matter of the technology controlling us
rather than the opposite.

People used to have a better understanding of the need
to keep to yourself occasionally, appreciate some down
time, secure some time to be calm. Now every moment
of every day is filled with endless streaming information.
Information about strangers, events around the world,
hearing the opinion of every person living, and having
the most menial of instances broadcast as news.

It's too much to keep up with, and yet we're still trying to do so.

The days of playing board games, eating dinners together,
sitting down, slowly doing any task, and all the other normal 
actions that people write off as corny and old-fashioned had
some very good points to them. Not all progress has to
eliminate what came before. Some things endured for a reason.

The creative mind needs quiet and space. People need time
alone to hear their own thoughts, their own voices. We all
need to write, unwind, and get in touch with self. We all need
time to recuperate from our day and prepare for the next . We
need one-on-one and face-time to build and keep relationships.

We need space and time to unwind and unplug from all
that hustle and bustle. And yet the idea that friends will think us
'out-of-the-loop'--or perhaps the fear that we might miss some
vital tidbit--keeps us tuning in, even as we weary.

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Back Where We Started

"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere

I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

I accepted their answers too, though they were often

in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve.

 I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself

questions which I, and only I, could answer.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging

of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else

appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself."

-Ralph Ellison

"The Myth of Mental Illness"

(In deference to Thomas Szasz and his book of the same name.)

It's obvious that some conditions are real and needing
treatment, but many diagnoses and treatments seem a
more arbitrary labeling of eccentricities as malignancies.
Manufactured notions of 'unwellness' due to the dreaded
and most dire of all conditions within a patient; not reflecting
the established social norms.

Others gravitate to states of 'illness' due to easily-influenced
minds that are told they are unwell (and said patient buying into
that diagnosis and all the nasty innuendo that conspires to attribute.)

Others have unwellness caused by their very marginalization
and ostracization which accompanies being labeled as 'mental defect'
in a world that hates all differentness; they are removed from the
benefits of inclusion and in fact suffer derision and brutality as a
result of being different.

Abuse and isolation definitely can lead to mental distress.

If 'mental illness' is the end result of trying to makes sense
of the collection of absurdities making up this world, who's
really to blame? Those who crack up, or those who are unwell
enough to pull off the duplicity and cutthroat participation?

As always, those in charge decide how history is written.

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Fiction is Good for the Soul

Life, in its unadorned bare form, is a terrifying, crazy,
chaotic, whelming essence.

Nobody addresses that directly too much. We just go
through the motions and ignore the dragon in the room.

As a result of how scary and demanding life is, we see
that without a sense of purpose, a mission, a code, or
other motivation, things are pretty unbearable. Whether
it's a conscious recognition or a conscious choice, we find
ourselves drawn over and over to anything we can apply
significance to or denote pleasure from.

It's probably a subliminal preemptive strike, a sense of
self-survival asserting itself, to seek out connection and
focus on nice things, our hobbies, our desires, our seeming
connections. Some natural DNA-level code for creating a
sense of 'better' so that all the horrible realities are kept
at bay.

A self-medicating, self-induced delusion to keep us from
going psychotic. Because, when you look into the Void,
it's difficult to come back from it. What is seen and known
is extremely difficult to purge; it's difficult, if not impossible,
to go back to ignorance and bliss.

We gravitate to the soothing, even if subconsciously we
know it's insignificant, or filler, or low-brow, or subjective.
We need a break from the chaos. It's in us to seek healing,
sustenance, and calming, whether through music, sports,
religion, dating, marriage, or other externals.

There are a myriad of directions to go with the things we
fill our lives with; church, work, politics, lovers, spouses,
children, projects, hobbies, relaxation, play. Belief systems,
causes, a life of service to many. Darker interests, too, 
like drugs, gambling, self-sabotage, secret or risky sexual
encounters, danger, angry outbursts, cons, and the like.

We build a web of activities and supposedly solid connections
that serve as (the idea of) insulation and cushioning.

But for those who see the artifice for what it is, and cannot
embrace the distraction, nor find sufficient purpose, the impact
of lessened connectivity is tiring and whelming.

When you aren't adept at interacting or networking or
pretending or game playing, it makes averting your eyes
from the Abyss difficult indeed.

All of our pretty story lines provide quite the anaesthesia.

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