All Day & Night In Front of a Screen
There's a Screen in Your Mind
Dear Friend
I first read George Orwell’s ‘1984’ when I was a teenager. Annie Lennox was in the charts at the time with a song from the movie featuring John Hurt.
I love Annie and John and we’d studied Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ in English classes in school. So along with ‘Down and Out In Paris and London’, ‘1984’ was one of the first ‘serious’ books I read of my own accord.
The screens in 1984 that can see and speak to you. The ones people exercise in front of. Maybe even this one in front of me now. I can’t help but feel uneasy about them.
Walking around my neighbourhood it always causes me to pause whenever a see a giant TV screen that’s been discarded in the street. Huge great big chunks of glass and moulded plastic. Defunct.
Memory works by association.
When we say that reminds me of… it’s because of the filing system our minds use. A simple way of understanding it is that associated things are linked together as if in the same folder.
An older memory of when I first moved to London. Around the time my oddly mystical experiences were becoming more frequent. Sitting on a bus, riding through Camberwell, I recall a yellow skip in the road. Two men filling it with beige personal computers. The kind that typed lines of green letters. Defunct. Skip fodder.
An older memory.
When we used to organise our lives by the TV schedule. As a kid I was equally happy staring all day at the screen or swinging on ropes over the beck in the woods. Scraped, muddy knees, or lounging in front of the gas fire. Happy. Taking it in.
I’m happy now, tapping a way at the keys writing to you.
Then there’s the other type of screen work. Soul deadening busy work. Or maybe even worse when we get pulled in to scrolling on social media. Substack advises authors to post about their blog on platforms like X or LinkedIn.
I’m still working out how to do that, but in the 10 minutes I was looking at X today I saw what looked like a shooting in Miama, a girl throwing boiling water over a boy ( hopefully was a bowl of water with dry ice to make it look like boiling water) and the victim of a homophobic beating in Nottingham.
My heart rate soared.
That stuff is not good to see.
To me it looks like insanity. A jumble of seemingly unrelated thoughts showing up as posts on a feed.
There’s a screen inside our minds too.
Our technology mimics our consciousness. Something like X offers a peek into the state of humanity’s collective consciousness. When we think, we see images. Think of your front door. What do you see? An image of your door. Maybe a moving image.
Our internal life matters a lot. We tell ourselves stories, have conversations with ourselves. Narrate the plot of our lives. We imagine what will happen, what we could’ve done or should’ve said.
It’s lived out internally. The thoughts and images activate our nervous system and so we feel what we imagine. Screens. All day long.
At night we dream.
Immersive experiences lived inwardly. While our bodies sleep.
Meaning making creatures. Strange. Contradictory. That’s okay. Just to become aware of it a little is enough. Inviting in a nice feeling. We don’t necessarily need more theories about ourselves. We need to experience connection to a nice feeling that comes from within.
The life that sustains all living things. It’s the one life. It shows up in different forms. A plastic screen. A bird. A human. A river.
As a stream becomes polluted and toxic when we dump waste in it, so the stream of our consciousness is polluted by thoughts of attack, judgement, cynicism, hatred, condemnation.
We cannot thrive in polluted environments.
It’s not bad to sit in front of a screen all day if you like to do that.
Does it bring comfort? Does it connect you to something warm and open and loving in you?
Diving beneath the often maddening surface of the world. Going deeper, just acknowledging who we are, how we feel. Knowing that a good friend accepts all of you. Makes it easier to do that for ourselves.
There is something wonderful in us, the life behind it all. Internal.
I’m forcing myself to put on my coat, it’s cold today. I’m glad it’s cold. The plants need it. I’m going outside into the mud, away from the internal screen. Just walking. Paying attention to the sensations of being alive.
My false self is coming with me. He’ll be commenting on it all. And then, silence.
Peace.
Is here.
Always
Now.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mike