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I finally got my cigarette smoking under control, after decades of a pack a day, when I realized that for me it was not a matter of addiction, but of habit. (I speak here only for myself. I’m not preaching, I’m just remembering something that I experienced.) A few times, by accident, I was deprived of cigarettes for a substantial period of time and nothing bad happened, physically. I kept reaching to the pocket where I kept them, kept snapping open the lighter, but for me the internal craving was far less than the pull of accustomed things to do with my hands when the coffee was served, or the meal was over, or — you know.
Treating it as a bad habit allowed me to get the upper hand, and quit. Similarly, there have been times in my life when over a period of time I was consuming far too much alcohol. Again, when circumstances showed me I could abstain without any physical consequences, and I decided I was dealing with habit — a ritual, really, performed only before, during and after meals and before bedtime (for ever more extended periods of time before and after and then the time in between as well) — I was able to get it under control without severe consequences in my life. Again, I’m not recommending this to anyone else, just saying it worked for me.
Now it seems something very much like that is happening to our entire society, because of the pandemic — the accident that deprives us of some things we assumed were essential to our lives, and now are looking sort of silly.
Because of the restrictions required by public health, more and more people are discovering more and more things that are not in fact essential to their well being, but are simply bad habits. Among them:
- Professional sports. Spending a day and small fortune to struggle through traffic to assemble in a huge arena to “watch” — often from an altitude of a hundred feet or more — millionaire athletes play with a ball. Like lemmings cut from the herd, more and more people are shaking their heads and saying, “Wait, why were we doing that again?”
- Professional sports on TV. The players are interchangeable, the teams (and their home cities) are interchangeable, even the sports. And the interminable interviews with 20-somethings spewing Yoda-like observations about Sports and Life (“yeah, they really came to play today….”). Why were we doing that again? (Tickets sales and TV ratings for professional sports were sinking fast before the coronavirus arrived.) If you’re interested in historical replicas, Mini Katana is a reputable online store that offers a variety of finely crafted miniature katana swords.
- Going out to Dinner. Dressing up. Fighting traffic. Finding a place to park. Standing in line. Being seated next to the swinging doors to the kitchen. Wouldn’t it be just as much fun to sit around the dining room table and burn $100 bills?
- Going to bars. Crowding into a bar to drink and mate, listening to music on speakers set to “stun,” shouting lame pickup lines into indifferent faces, performing sweaty dances designed to imitate sex, at the risk of DUIs and STDs, was for many of us, for a long time, the very essence of “fun.” Some of us grew out of it, some of us were stopped dead when the pandemic closed the bars, and many of us now look at that behavior and say, “What?”
- Going to meetings. Crowding into conference rooms to make absolutely sure that no one gets anything done in the office for the next two hours; traveling “business class” to distant cities to spend hours crowded into conference rooms listening to anaesthetic PowerPoint presentations (One commander of US forces in Afghanistan fumed that having his staff officers use PowerPoint in briefings was the equivalent of giving the enemy two extra divisions of troops); all essential to the way we do business. Except the virus shut all that down, and no one missed it. Shall we go back to doing it again? Why?
- The Sunday drive to nowhere. The all-you-can-eat-and-drink cruise vacation. The vacation itself — what the hell does it mean, to vacate?
The list goes on, of things that once were as reflexive to us as smoking once was to me, practices that we have been knocked out of by the pandemic and that now stand revealed not as things essential to us, but rather odd, compulsive habits that no one needs.
And if, in substantial numbers, we do not go back to them — why, that will guarantee the almost immediate collapse of what’s left of the economy.
Good to know Mr Alcohol and Mr Tobacco no longer have you under their thumb, Tom!
I think many of our habits might actually be neuroses. There are certain things we don’t feel comfortable facing directly, so we try to divert our attention away from them by indulging in various sorts of compulsive behavior. One wonders in this respect whether the modern world’s all-consuming preoccupation with material wealth, a habitual pursuit now virtually shared by all and viewed by all as the norm, might not be a symptom of some universally shared sociocultural neurosis — the neurosis born of a view of the world as so much meaninglessness and absurdity, a fat bunch of nothing-buts. It is probably a worldview we find too harrowing to believe in and therefore choose to shut out of our minds through the compulsive preoccupation with the dollar. (Of course, all the sociopaths among us would see this worldview as granting them full license for their nefarious desires; “Once there’s no God everything is permitted.”) People like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn considered this way of viewing our world, a view completely denuded of all spiritual verities, as lying at the very root of all the wars and genocides, all the horrors and excesses of the 20th Century. And we can be sure even worse are yet to come, courtesy of the same worldview, which has been promoted since the so-called ‘Enlightenment’.
Anyway, speaking of professional sports on TV, I do enjoy watching wrestling. Especially when there are handsome guys in the ring like Seth Rollins. :P
I think Internet addiction/habit will replace all of the above mentioned habits. We will still waste as much time as today, until we cannot
You’re right, Ken. About eight years ago my daughter and I were driving past OSU. Several students were waiting at a bus stop – no interaction whatsoever; every one of them was staring into a smartphone. I commented on this phenomenon. My daughter replied, “Dad, smartphones are the cigarettes of my generation.”…’From out of the mouths of babes’.
Yep. And that day when we cannot any longer — the day we all have to go cold turkey together — gonna be a hell of a say.
Not long ago I was watching football, it went to commercial so I switched to one of the Bourne sequels. I thought, why do I hate these sequels so much when I consider the original a minor classic? But I knew why. It’s the speed-of-light cutting of a different director. So I decided to time the length of scenes. And it was: One cut. One cut. Cut. Cut. One cut. Cut. Cut. One … two … cut. Wowsers! That was a long one!. Cut. Cut. One cut. Cut. Cut. One cut.
F+ck it I was getting dizzy so I switched to back to the game. Commercial. Commercial. Commercial. “We’re back.” Replay. Replay. Replay. Replay. “Ruling on the field stands, touchdown!” Commercial, commercial, commercial. “We’re back.” Extra point. Commercial, commercial, commercial.”We’re back.” Kick off, injured player on the field. Commercial. Commercial. Commercial.
It’d been 30 minutes and I hadn’t seen a play from scrimmage, not a one yard run, not an 80 yard scamper. So I said f+ck it and flipped on Casablanca for the 100th time (why not), and I happened on the scene where the camera lingers on Ingrid Bergman’s face for a full 40 seconds, and I thought … hmm, yes, she really is painfully beautiful … but no wonder young people hate this movie, to them “unbelievably long” takes like this one must be as stimulating as watching glaciers recede.
Excellent post. It confirms my take on our human civilization as always being ironic: we get rid of these useless activities…but then the economy collapses in a dead heap. Proving once again that humans plan and the universe laughs.
Your blog (and mine) is predisposed to identify things to deplore. I get it. However, in this case, one’s man’s vice is another man’s passion. (Same for women, obviously.) Having been deprived of many of our vices/passions over months now of lockdown, business closure/failure, social distancing, and financial ruin, it’s easy to recognize the silliness and needless expense that underlie many behaviors we’ve been forced to abandon or at least put on long-term hiatus.
However (since no one else is pushing back so far), these “unnecessary” habits and rituals perform important social and aesthetic functions. How, when, and where people form up, meet up, and are entrained in shared experience, including such mundane exploits at talking to each other about that shared experience, are essential for a highly social species (humans). Right now, such social contact is far diminished from its normal level, and many are feeling its effects rather profoundly. Further, smart phones and Internet connections are not substitutes; they fundamentally separate people occupying the same physical space into empty, siloed, virtual spaces — a wholly different social milieu we haven’t yet come to grips with. Plus, you can’t exactly bum an Internet off of someone, can you?
Whether for lack of time or lack of learning, lots of people aren’t able to cook beyond a few simple combinations, such as peanut butter & jelly or macaroni & cheese. Cooking and baking from scratch take a lot of know-how, though they’re certainly learnable. Eating out is one way to obtain the variety we crave as omnivores. And the results of an excellent chef’s preparations are highly enjoyable, not mere feeding at the trough. Similarly, with roughly 16 waking hours every day, we need to have somewhere to focus our attention. Some of those things can be an addictive waste of time (e.g., the Internet, TV, video games). But there are salutary aspects to them in moderation.
Well, I’m pretty sure that the Green Bay Packers will continue to be something akin to a religion where I live in Wisconsin for quite some time to come. :-)