Streaming Burnout

For those out there yet to hop on the Burnout Bandwagon, just a quick “alert” to let you know there’s no room left. Completely sold-out. Everyone’s knee deep in being maxed-out and shot to shit. Burnout is the new orange.

Philosopher David Whyte sums it up nicely:

The exhaustion of burnout always recalls a previously felt internal fire, one from which our unquenchable energies once emerged. Burnout denotes a kind of amnesia: not only in the forgetting of our very personal priorities but the inability to locate a source inside us that previously seemed to run through all the seasons of our life. This loss of a fiery essential centre is also experienced as a loss of faith: a form of forgetting, not only that the source actually existed inside me in the first place but that I might not now ever remember how to drink from it again.

Burnout always involves a loss of the timeless and therefore of the ability to rest. Burnout, in a very profound way, is a loss of friendship with time itself… the experience of feeling continually out of season… In the loss of faith in existence itself, we refuse, in a kind of symmetrical sympathy, to fully exist ourselves. Being out of season with the outside world means we also miss our own inner, creative, tidal comings and goings.

Volumes are being written about digital age overload and how it’s only getting more intense. Like hitting pop-ups on every single site you visit. You can longer read an opinion or check a score without being pitched, solicited or hit up. One site recently demanded a DNA strand before entering. Target marketing is pathological.

Present Shock is a book that came a few years ago. The kind printed on paper with ink. It weighs less than half a pound and it never crashes. You’ll need an outside light source to read it at night, which I’ve been doing with a building sense of anxiety. The author, Douglas Rushkoff, does a bang up job of breaking down some of the crazy shit that’s unfolding thanks to our ever-escalating tech revolution. You may think you know about the problems inherent in the digital age, but you probably haven’t thought about the consequences as deeply as you should have.

Rushkoff couples incisive critique with some terror-inducing analysis on the psychological effects of trying to keep on top of something as vast as the internet. There have been similar zeitgeist shifts throughout history. So how is this one different? You can bet there was a vocal minority of ancient Mesopotamians bitching about how the wheel was going fuck up everything for the worse. And once Industrial Age machines started running 24/7, literally grinding through employees, that minority quickly evolved into a majority.

You can read Schopenhauer essays from the mid-1800’s and sense his alarm at how people are becoming more and more dehumanized, more and more distracted. Virtually no one has enough time anymore. The gripe is far from novel. But it’s starting to become clear that the phenomenon of digital omnipresence is having a more pernicious effect than we’ve seen in past epochs. Our obsessions with the present tense is compulsive.

Rushkoff breaks it down into five chapters you’ll grind your molars through. But he also manages to provide a few actionable suggestions rather than just doom saying about how everything not happening RIGHT NOW should be pushed aside in favor of the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

He kicks it off by describing the death of the narrative. If you watch Mad Men, you’ll see how things worked before everything became instantaneous. Historically, our species learned through the intuitive structure of beginning, middle and end. Even TV ads worked this way. A protagonist is introduced. He/She faces a formidable antagonist during a moment of monumental crisis: spots on their glassware the very night their favorite endocrinologist is coming over. But in the lat moment, a solution is solved via the product for sale, and at a once-in-a-lifetime sale price.

But that narrative structure has been gutted today in everything from advertisement to movies to pornography. In Tolstoy, you had to wade through a thousand pages before getting to the sex. By then, the most subtle of erotic moves had you twitching with arousal. Now we start at full penetration. Skip the set up, forget the foreplay, we want instant everlasting orgasm! We’re very busy.

The trend was thrilling when it was new. TV shows like “24” overloaded episodes with jaw-dropping plot turns every ten minutes. Steroids are fun for when you start seeing dramatic changes. But episode after episode, season after season, the viewer becomes inured. And unfortunately for the writers, there’s no where left to go creatively when you’ve started by jumping the whale shark. Even the best of these shows flies off the rails because the model isn’t sustainable.

The instinct to fill “dead space” with something attention grabbing, be it explosions or banner ads or Fox News anchors jerking each other off with toothy laughter because there’s no legit news to report, comes with its share of dark side-effects– one of which Rushkoff labels “Didgifrenia”.

It begins to drive you crazy, literally, or worse, knocks you out of sync with your own biorhythms– Plenty of anxiety keeping us all awake as we stare at an illuminated screen wondering why our mind won’t stop racing. We’re collectively suffering from Rushkoffian “Filter Failure”: a paralytic inability to voluntarily turn away.

In the past we seemed to have more time for the future. For planning. There was even room for something Schopenhauer insists is essential for humankind: boredom. My nephew tells me he’s bored, but he feels that while simultaneously scrolling TikTok, eating M&M’s and the watching the NFL Redzone multi-cast.

Rushkoff appropriately labels this “Fractalnoia,” the syndrome of failing to remember that whatever’s streaming into our devices isn’t half as precious as what we’re already engaged in, no matter what it is. Our mental infintive has been split into multiple fractals.

The book is careful not to retread cliches about the evils of technology. Technology, for the most part, is neutral. It has no ulterior motivations of its own… yet.  But humankind does, and therein lies the clusterfuck.

“I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people than what people are choosing to do to one another through technology,” Rushkoff proclaims. “Facebook’s reduction of people to predicatively modeled profiles and investment banking’s convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.”

We chose that. But we can still choose otherwise. That is, if we’re not totally fried to a crisp.

The foundation from which we transform the experience of burnout is always the realization that we have been measuring all the wrong things in all the wrong ways and that we have for too long, mis-measured our sense of self in the same way; that we have allowed the shallow rewards of false goals or false people to mesmerize, bedazzle and entrain us: to hide from us an ancient and abiding human dynamic — that we belong to something greater and even better for us than the realm of the measured.