Daily Tasks
Intention: Recharge mentally, live in person while doing some light reading.
Meditations
6:44 AM
Ian got up today, felt the urge and was compelled to scroll. He couldn’t resist, and he had just been mentally nagging for self-indulgence. Immediately it was to meet this unfulfilled explicit frustration. He opened the app and started scrolling, one thing led to another, Ian got up today, felt the urge and was compelled to scroll. He couldn’t resist. Immediately it was to fulfill unfulfilled sexual frustration. He opened the app and started scrolling, one thing led to another, he couldn’t get himself off. It was only about 30 minutes in that he looked at the time, he got up at 4:30 and it was already 5:20 when he realized he had wasted an entire hour.
He read more and this entire phenomenon is known as “gooning”, and has recently gotten popular with Gen Z. It’s prolonged, sometimes up to hours of this euphoric sexual state, akin to being on intense ecstasy or psychoactive substances. The problem becomes when arousal is necessitated by online explicit NSFW or highly stimulating, revealing images. This leads to numerous dysfunctions in initiating real, intimate connection.
It became so apparent to him – he needs to channel this energy into other outlets. He immediately deleted that app, got up, and proceeded to do some yoga. Yoga was incredibly grounding – he was outside just around sunrise, and then he went on a walk in the woods. That is where he started writing this discourse:
The loneliness epidemic is actually more serious than I thought, and the dangers of technology, addictive AI social media is worsening this development. Even tied to my own social relationships, interpersonal relationships with significant others in attraction, it is so hard to find people when you’re far away and not around others like a school environment.
But more specifically to what I observed this morning, I am particularly concerned about how your attention gets completely sucked in on these apps, TikTok, Instagram. And praying on male loneliness, sexual desires, and sucking them into a world where they can’t differentiate between reality and what’s just a screen. Especially with gowning when I got to 30 minutes I just realized there’s an entire subculture built around this and contributes to the problems we’re seeing with in cells and how men can’t form authentic relationships with women. And I realized well all the friends I have almost and more than half of them are women, and there are some of the best friends that I have and the most supportive, caring people ambitious, doing amazing things and Hijacking your nervous system system, a biological defense mechanism for survival that evolved over millions of years ago is no match for a changing environment that praise on these mechanisms.
No wonder guys find it so hard to approach girls, when you’re only in primary experience of them has been through an app in social media, on hinge, this hyper reality. And the in person component is so quintessential, almost lacking at this point.
I fear for the new generation who would be grown up around this virtual reality. COVID screwed around them, where the mechanisms of promoting prosocial and beneficial behavior for hundreds of years and thousands of years of human social interactions are now being completely decoupled and replaced by the scrolling.
I was even thinking about the yoga from this morning and how beautiful it was just to get it off of my phone, and be fully immersed in nature without any distractions or siphons of my attention. It felt right in natural, and her hardware is designed to run. Our software is designed to be running on this distributed, operating system, and a lot of TikTok and these new algorithms are malware that take advantage of our outdated hardware and mess up our software inside.
Adding to that, I think my current generation, the older Gen Z or the middle who have been affected by Covid is getting a compounded effect with social media, where crucial adolescent, informative experiences, socially, and culturally are being replaced, and all of us who’ve been sold on the promise of going to college and having a stable job lined up are Dangling in mid air right now. A lot of us hard-working, well intention, kids who went to top schools are struggling to find work that actually is meaningful, and the prospect of AI taking away entry jobs is frightening. I even read a report by I believe his name was Paul Krugman and economist at Harvard who discussed How these effects will affect you for life, because you’re delayed entry into the workforce will stunt your earnings, your social structures are stunted as well and this development generally is delayed.
So in summary, taking account are human interconnectedness crisis, the rampant malware of algorithms that are distorting our reality, combined with a pandemic that rattled and will have long-term consequences for our generation, along with an accelerating job market that’s leaving behind entry-level in college graduates in the workforce, this is a profoundly scary time to be alive.
With all this said my two cents is whenever there’s crisis, there’s just as much opportunity, and keeping your outlook, nimble, agile, and receive what the universe delivers often leads to fruitful and wondrous results that you would never have initially imagined