Not that you asked, but my fingernails are longer than they’ve been in a while. I just spent a week off the grid — no World Wide Web, no e-mail, no cell phone, no landline — and at some point I seem to have quit biting my nails.
But before you get envious: in addition to unplugging from the wired world, I plugged into a regimen that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was at a silent meditation retreat. My fellow yogis and I did about five hours of sitting meditation each day and five hours of walking meditation. Then each night we listened to a talk about the context of all this: the Buddhist worldview.
So I’ve failed to control my variables. Who knows how much of my newfound calm is due to escaping modern technology and how much is due to immersing myself in an ancient discipline?
On the other hand, there’s an illuminating synergy between the two. A week of silent meditation can help highlight how technology keeps us in its grip, and what some of the costs of our ongoing surrender are.
Like many meditation retreats, this one emphasized “mindfulness,” which involves a calm focus on the present moment — much the kind of focus that is said to be endangered by the infinite regress of distractions and disruptions brought to us by digital technology. And this awareness of the moment includes awareness of your internal states; you’re supposed to carefully examine your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions. So when you come back from a retreat and plug your newly mindful mind into the grid, the subtle sources of the grid’s power seem more salient.
Take Paris Hilton, for example. When I fired up my computer to catch up on the news I’d missed, I saw a headline saying she’d been arrested for cocaine possession. I felt something urge me to click on the headline. I examined that something and found it to be a certain low-key delight in misfortunes that befall rich and famous people who seem (from afar, at least) really gross.
I’m happy to say that this schadenfreude wasn’t overwhelming, and I resisted the temptation to click — until I saw, right under the headline, “(video).” Thinking someone had captured her arrest with a cell phone camera, I felt a medium-sized desire to witness her humiliation. I wrestled with the desire. I lost. I clicked. What a sucker! It was just video of some news anchor’s report on the arrest. I felt annoyed, even cheated, by this misleading labeling. Grievance welled up within.
Maybe Buddha’s time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from certain emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them.
In the space of only a few minutes, the grid had sent a succession of emotions coursing through my body, none that I’m especially proud of. And I feel especially not proud of them right after a meditation retreat, which grants enough critical distance from your feelings to highlight their frequent pointlessness, if not absurdity.
Of course, the grid also stirs positive emotions, and I won’t here join the debate over whether the good it does outweighs the bad. My point is just how frequently and often subtly it activates our emotions, period. Next time you’re about to click on a headline, pause to see if there’s some feeling urging you on — outrage over a heinous crime; satisfaction that some culprit is being brought to justice; the tribalistic joy that leads you to read about a Yankees win or (if you’re a Mets fan) a Yankees loss; the alluring anticipation of vindication or reassurance when an op-ed seems likely to support your worldview; the well-founded trust that a columnist you dislike will say things that confirm his or her worthlessness.
E-mail, too, plays on your emotions. How often do you click on an e-mail without some degree — however small — of such feelings as tentative hope or eager anticipation, mild anxiety or even dread? And because your inbox is the portal to so much virtual human contact, it can exert a collective pull. Sometimes when I feel the urge to check in, and then realize I don’t have my iPhone, I have small but discernible feelings of loss or sorrow. (And my iPhone doesn’t even have a Facebook app!)
Of course, none of these emotions are modern inventions. It’s just that the grid messes with them on a whole new scale. Via e-mail, a brain designed for a small and intimate social environment enters a much bigger universe of people, whose sometimes consequential communication arrives unpredictably. And when we move from e-mail to the Web, we face a medium so vivid and interactive as to offer a tool of seduction with unprecedented power.
A particular problem for me is techno-lust. The Web makes it so easy to window shop! I won’t tell you how much time I’ve spent cyber-evaluating the Blackberry Torch and the Palm Pre (some of it on my iPhone). This research hasn’t yet resulted in a purchase, but it has ensured that ads for cell phones follow me all over the Web, and this in turn has triggered a broader research program that is now entering its penultimate phase: After considering several alternatives, I’ve again narrowed it down to the Blackberry Torch and the Palm Pre.
So there you go: covetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on. It’s the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it’s because the underlying emotions haven’t changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today.
Personally, I’m a fan of the formula, or at least of the version of it I’ve seen on modern American meditation retreats. If this column hasn’t featured lush praise for it, that’s partly because I’ve already written rapturously — a year ago, on this very Web site — about a previous retreat. But it’s also because I don’t want to oversell the program. The serenity tends to fade once you plug back into the grid. Sustaining even modest mindfulness in the modern world is a challenge.
But I’m working on it, trying to keep living in the moment. I meditated this morning. My fingernails remain impressive. And I’m totally over that Paris Hilton thing — it was just a momentary lapse.
Postscript: If you’re interested in the details: the retreat I attended was in Massachusetts, at the Insight Meditation Society, which teaches in the Vipassana tradition. (A prominent Vipassana retreat center on the West Coast is Spirit Rock.) The teachers at this particular retreat were Narayan Liebenson Grady and Michael Liebenson Grady of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. (I’m a little reluctant to disclose even these bare details, as there’s a kind of implied intimacy at these retreats that I wouldn’t want to violate, but since I’ve said virtually nothing about the retreat itself, my conscience is fairly clear.)
