Tag: psychology

The Lake of Honey

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Lara was aware she was doomscrolling. Part of her wanted to throw her phone away, but she couldn’t stop watching those short videos that were made to grab her attention and keep her wanting more. Her eyes were stuck to the screen, and her thumb was programmed to ceaselessly swipe up. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she wanted to cry. “Why can’t I do anything about it?”

It was 1:04 AM. She was in her spacious, fashionably furnished bedroom, sunk in a plush velvet sofa by the window. The sheer alabaster linen curtains were open, allowing the moonlight to invade her bedroom unimpeded. Everything in the bedroom seemed to be in its rightful place, except her. She was lying on the sofa when she should have been in bed, sleeping, dreaming, resting.

The more she scrolled, the angrier she became at herself, but every video postponed that anger another minute. Every last video she planned to watch was followed by another video, each more unfulfilling than the last. She kept wanting to watch one more, and she did. She scrolled.

Then, in the split second between the video she had just watched and the video she was about to watch, she imagined herself drowning in a lake of honey. The new video started playing, but her attention had now turned inward, and she saw herself sinking deeper into honey, and she wondered whether she could swim in honey if she were ever thrown in such a lake. She then thought, “Are the videos I’m watching supposed to be the honey I’m drowning in? I’m more like a fly stuck to a sticky flypaper.” But that thought was short-lived. She started imagining pulling herself out of the lake thanks to a rope that a good-looking stranger threw her way. The stranger looked like he was in his mid-twenties, five or so years younger than her. He was a muscular man with broad shoulders, wearing only swimming shorts. Thick veins ran down from his biceps and forearms and disappeared only when they reached his wrists. His whole body shone in the moonlight. And in that darkness, he was like the light a dying person saw at the end of the tunnel. Lara held on to the rope he threw and pulled herself out of the lake. When she reached the lakeshore, the sun replaced the moon in the sky. The moon seamlessly faded out as a hot Mediterranean summer sun faded in. The good-looking stranger extended his hand to help her stand up. “Thanks,” she said. “Welcome,” he said. She gazed into his ice-blue eyes. His face… she did not know what face to give him yet. But standing there in front of him, she felt the honey trickle down her body, and she realized she was naked, and she was naked because at that moment she desired to be… She made the man with the ice-blue eyes fulfill her wish. Her lust was the puppet master. She made him pull her towards him, made him lick all of the honey off her, and then she made him… Her phone rang, and she was pulled back into the real world where she was lying on the sofa by the window with her phone, which was now vibrating, in her right hand. Her left hand was in her underwear. The call was from an unknown number, and it was 1:09 AM, which meant it was either someone calling a wrong number or a call she did not want to answer. She wanted to return to the arms of the stranger with ice-blue eyes. She longed to go back. Before declining the call, she wondered whom it could be. She waited a minute to see if the same number would call again, but no call came. So, she allowed herself to drift back into her fantasies, and this time she gave the young man a face, the face of the bartender with the nice smile and ice-blue eyes who served her drinks two nights ago.

Influence as Capital

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, we read: “Influence in the world is a capital, which must be carefully guarded if it is not to disappear.”

The character who thinks so also thinks that “if he were to beg for all who begged him to do so, he would soon be unable to beg for himself.” That is why he rarely uses his influence. He prefers to save it for a rainy day.

Influence is a capital, but there is more than one way to use it. You can spend influence (like you spend money), and you can also invest it.

You can spend influence on favors, for instance. The more favors you ask from a person, the less influence you’ll have over him. Eventually, you’ll run out of influence, and you can no longer ask for favors. (The number of favors you can request depends on the “cost” of the favor and the number of influence “points” you have.)

Investing influence is a little different. It goes like this: The son of someone important is looking for a job, so you help him find work by using the influence you have in the company you work for. In this case, you did not spend your influence, you invested it. In the future, the son will be ready to return the favor, and the father will use a bigger influence for you to get something you want. (Note, however, that all investments come with risks. You may invest your influence but get nothing in return.)

The Dishwasher’s Anxiety: The Return of the Lesser Tasks

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Doing the dishes brings me (back) to the desert of the real and gives me anxiety. When I’m disconnected from the virtual world, and there are no distractions (like music or TV), and there’s no one else (like my wife) with me in the kitchen, certain thoughts, like dead fish (forgotten to be fed), rise to the surface to float among the oceanic debris of my mind. My thoughts go to where the trash is, to the center of an unremembered psychological gyre, where mental litter has been accumulating for a long time. And as I rinse the first batch of plates and arrange them on the dish rack, anxiety builds. My heart simmers in a saucepan on the gas stove.

Cutting the Umbilical Wire

Unplugging myself from the virtual world has become a little like cutting my own umbilical cord (again and again), separating myself from the pseudo-singularity that intends to keep me in its womb. But this separation never lasts long. Either the umbilical cord — wire — (like a slithering cable, a hissing electrical wire) will come after me to reconnect me to the virtual world, or, after agonizing withdrawal symptoms, I will seek the teat of the (omnipresent, omniscient) machine and start sucking on it.

The artificial universe keeps me busy. It keeps me entertained. It keeps me away from myself, whom it would be hell to spend time with.

[We’ve become like whales. The artificial universe is our sea. We still come up for air, but we are sea animals now.] [We are like foie gras ducks. We allow the ramming of virtual pipes down our eye sockets and ears to enable the pumping of massive amounts of content into our brains.]

But it’s important to note here that disconnecting from the internet is not enough to exit the hyperreal, to reenter raw reality. If the TV is on, or if there’s music playing in the background, I am still in the hyperreal. I must exclude everything from the setting that can interfere with my mind’s idleness — or, to put it differently, for this to work, to experience the anxiety of a man washing the dishes, my mind must be “unassigned,” idle. Only then can the mind drift and, often without the slightest intention, find itself at the center of the psychological gyre, the Atlantis that can only be found when we are lost in the sea of Kierkegaard’s doppelganger’s infinite resignation. Land ahoy! Here it is, then, finally, the island made of everything we’ve thrown (tried to throw) away.

Here, I expect that some of you will say, “But we know you. You spend much less time staring at screens than many of us.” You are right, and this changes nothing. I still (unconsciously and sometimes consciously) keep myself from rediscovering Atlantis. I do this by getting wasted, by constantly intoxicating myself with booze, books, and other boredom-repelling activities. No one wants to stay in the desert of the real, which is exile, or a penal colony of sorts that is paradoxically (the nauseating) freedom (we all cower from). So, like almost everyone in this technologically advanced, becoming world, I am almost always in the hyperreal. It is only when I do things like washing the dishes (without distractions) that I enter the process of exiting the hyperreal: this process is the anxiety I’m talking about.

The Dishwasher’s Anxiety

This anxiety (of a man doing the dishes without distraction) is too intense for me — it’s unbearable. (Is this why dirty dishes pile up in the sink when it’s my turn to do them?) One can only wash so many mugs, spoons, forks, knives, pots, and plates without coming face to face with the [unnamable] that human progress strove to leave behind.

In addition to the above, the anxiety I’m talking about seems to be powered by postponement. It isn’t procrastination because the mind is never idle, and we are always “working.” There’s always something “more important” (which is, in fact, less important) to do, and that’s what we’re continuously preoccupied with. The mind never finds time for defragmentation. (Sleep is not enough since it happens automatically in the subconscious. Conscious, deliberate defragmentation is also needed.) Unfortunately, we constantly postpone things we ought to deal with. We let these things die (like fish) and, as they (remain uneaten and) slowly decompose, join the accumulated trash at the center of our polluted psychological gyres.

“I do not have time for this,” our busy mindset keeps repeating. “I will deal with this later,” we keep saying. We focus on the “important” or more “urgent” things while we postpone going to the dentist or the doctor, postpone spending quality time with the wife, postpone the confrontation with the person who’s been bothering us, postpone the planned dinner with the parents, postpone the call with the mother, postpone the happy hour with friends, postpone calling the plumber or the electrician, postpone dealing with this little issue and that little issue, et cetera, ad infinitum. And when the more “important” and more “urgent” tasks are completed, we find ourselves too exhausted to take care of what we postponed.

In other words, we postpone certain things to prioritize certain other things, and later, the time comes for us to deal with the corpse (or the ghost) of what we postponed more than we should have, which gives us the dishwasher’s anxiety when we, well, do the dishes.

But that’s not all. There are more things to consider. There’s also [The repression of the awareness of death: we do not think about our death; we only acknowledge our eventual death in passing. After all, who has time to look at the hourglass, to count the slipping sands of time? Who is willing to waste their finite time to contemplate mortality?] And also [The repression of the absurd: we do not think about the meaninglessness; we merely acknowledge it in passing as if it’s an acquaintance we’ve never had (or will never have) a conversation with.]

The Fear of Missing Out

While I’d like to exit the hyperreal, I do not want to live exclusively in the desert of the real, where the anxiety is. Of course, in the universe of raw reality, the anxiety ultimately dies away if you stay there long enough. However, in this universe of raw reality, there will come a time when you’ll have to dump your humanness and return to being an animal or worse, a god. And that is not the path I want to take, for I wish to remain human.

And, no, I don’t think that if I stay where the anxiety is and keep searching, I will find Easter eggs that so many gamers love to find. I know I won’t unlock new levels. And I won’t uncover the “hidden” truth, will I? Will I uncover the “hidden” truth? Or is it because I already know the yet-uncovered “hidden” truth that I don’t want to dwell there too long? Or is it the “fear of missing out” that brings me back to the artificial universe? After all, whatever is interesting — or is talked about — is already uploaded or simulated in it.

The fear of missing out (FOMO) is a trending disorder, for sure. And one of the components of this anxiety that visits me when I’m washing the dishes is FOMO. But FOMO isn’t just the fear of missing out. I would like to redefine it, adjust its definition a little. FOMO is also the fear of having missed out on something. It is also the fear of not knowing that you’ve missed something. And because everything I don’t want to miss out on is in the virtual world (or is communicated to me via the virtual world), we can say that FOMO is triggered when I go offline. Moreover, FOMO is not always about the fear of missing out on something amazing. It can be something terrible, too. For instance, when I’m doing the dishes, I may think of the following things: “What if something happens to a family member, and I’m not there when they message me?” “What if I get an urgent email that I need to action on immediately?” “What if Israel has launched a large-scale attack and is now invading Southern Lebanon while I’m here soaping tea spoons and coffee mugs?” To be connected is to have access to (overwhelming) knowledge that you may or may not need. (And knowledge isn’t power, by the way.) On the other hand, to be disconnected is like swimming in the ocean at night, waiting for something from underwater to tickle your foot and make you shit your pants — or, in this case, your shorts.

The Return of the Lesser Tasks

This inner turmoil, this restlessness, this fear comes when I start soaping the second batch of dishware and silverware. It means that I’m now spending time with myself. And all the “secondary” tasks I previously postponed now occupy my thoughts. I feel guilty, and I worry about the consequences. Here they are, the ghosts of overdue tasks (and things that I wanted to do but didn’t), haunting me. It’s too late to do them now, and I have to decide whether I let them rot in my head (as buried potentialities) or do them anyway by saying, “It’s better too late than never.”

But I must now return to the artificial universe, which is the universe that man made. So, the house he built became his home. And he is home when he’s neither fully in the physical world nor fully in the virtual world. We’re only home when we’re in the hyperreal. But like the occasional hike in nature, it’s good to visit the desert of the real sometimes. It’s good to smell the flowers that bloom in fear. It’s good to hear the birds sing what we can never understand.

This piece was originally published on my Medium account on February 28, 2024.