The Pings We Carry

Virtual Vignettes from a Hypocritical Luddite

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. —Tim O’Brien

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T.S. Eliot

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. —Albert Camus

Above: The anatomy of a 21st-century day.

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We were born in quicksand of silicone. The more we thrash about, the faster we sink.

We accumulate years without wisdom, age without insight, and experience without growth.

We like, but seldom laugh.

We heart, but rarely hug.

We screenshot, but forget to smile.

The culprit is the dopamine industrial complex and its discordant cabal of pings, dings, and bings delivered across screens large and small.

Physically, these things weigh nothing.

Psychologically, they have more heft than we could ever imagine.

This digital monsoon is acid rain and yet we gulp it like water.

It is candy laced with arsenic; sweet, but deadly.

Each distraction only metastasizes the psychic stress driven by constant attention and hyperactive minds pickled by social media.

Facebook’s first president (the infamous Sean Parker) confessed the following:

We wanted to exploit a vulnerability in human psychology. To do so, the apps needed to provide a little dopamine every once and a while to keep you hooked. Me, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom (Instagram’s founder), and others knew this and we did it anyway. God only knows what it’s doing to our kids.

Instead of peace and quiet, we have cacophony; a string of false notes that noisily step over one another like commuters on New York’s crowded subway platforms.

The humanization of technology walks hand in hand with the dehumanization of humanity.

In a world run by semiconductors, the body withers and the soul stunts.

What we no longer carry with our hands, shoulders, and backs we now hold in our heads.

We’ve replaced manual labor with mental overload and it’s killing us day by day.

We leave work, but it doesn’t leave us. Our to-do list squats rent free behind our eyes and between our ears.

The dose makes the poison and moderation is no more.

We have seen miraculous technological innovations—microwaves, color television, air conditioning, smartphones—yet these things have had virtually no effect on overall satisfaction.

Instead, addiction, broken homes, friendlessness, sexlessness, and loneliness have all run rampant.

Technological improvements have boosted convenience and collapsed our social lives.

We have easier lives, but they also lack meaning.

There’s a reason people like screens more than mirrors. In the former we see delusion, in the latter, reality.

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The problem of modernity is that we have everything we want, but nothing that we need.

Fight Club put it well:

I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Nothing settles stubbornly or weighs so heavily as work that remains undone.

And we have so much to do that we can't bring ourselves to start.

We choose everything at the expense of something.

We double our screen time and halve our attention span.

We take one step forward and two steps back—thinking we are making progress, but actually going in reverse.

We think too much and seek too much and want too much at the expense of the simple joy of just being.

We no longer grow up; we just grow old.

And yet, if you stand still—neither swiping nor scrolling—you can hear the soul whisper:

Lay the phone down and let silence settle.

Lift up your heart and listen for the pulse that never needs charging.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom