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These are two very famous abstract art paintings.
I'm not an art expert and I'm not gonna talk about art here. Yet I find art an extremely good tool to visually convey counter intuitive ideas, even those that have nothing to do with the artworks themselves.
I will use Kandinsky's "Composition VII" (the first one) to represent reality. Rothko's "No. 4, two dominants" (the second one) on the other hand can be thought to represent a polarized simplification of that same reality.
Now imagine trying to understand the complexity inherent in the first representation by using the second one as a model. Ridiculous, right?
Worse still, consider how stupid it would be to operate on the complex reality by using the polarized model.
Well, as absurd as it may seem, that is what many of us do every day, when it comes to pretty much everything we can think of.
In my opinion this is one of the main tragedies of our times.
The debate over the effects of smartphones on society and human mental health has been ongoing for quite some time.
The situation has obviously gotten worse in the last 2-3 years. Buses and trains are full of people who seem to be staring hypnotized at the screen of their phone, swiping their finger on it now and then, just like zombies.
New techniques, such as continuous video scrolling loops, have been introduced. They target some well known weak points of our psyche and they promote the production of some hormones that give us pleasure. If you feel guilty after having wasted hours watching some silly videos non-stop, well do not worry: it's not your fault. You're being manipulated like a lab mouse.
Fortunately (maybe) we're not mice, and we do have methods to preserve our mental independence, if we want to. So if you are happy with your hours of trance like state you can ignore the rest of this post. But if you want to get out of this mental trap you might find what follows useful.
The solution is actually grounded in some very old ideas. Good old Siddhartha Gautama, aka the great Buddha, had a very similar insight when he was trying to find a way out of our obsessive thinking about past and future, that distracts us from the only moment that matters: the present one. That solution is called MINDFULNESS.
Let’s clarify the problem first.
If the expectations you had
were never actually met,
you'd better exit virtuality
and start to manage reality.
