Anxiety: Two (b)
MCAD Library: Flickr.com
In Part (a) we looked at a couple of exercises that are designed to develop heightened meta-cognition (thinking about feelings and thinking about thinking) around what ratchets anxiety for things that are out of your locus of control and particularly emphasizes the embedded nature of anxiety as an eating disorder for you. Now we turn our attention to the dominant medium through which we receive the bulk of our marketing and propaganda messages today: the smartphone.
Smartphone
Smartphones came onto the scene in 2012, just under a year before this article was originally written. Look at how far we’ve come. Adults are spending an average of four and a half hours a day on these things.
“Americans check their phones an average of 144 times a day, which is a 58% decrease from their last cell phone usage survey published in January 2022. However, we’re also spending an average of four hours and 25 minutes each day on our phones, up 30% from last year.”
For a decent rundown on the global stats and how these things are used by us all: What’s the Big Data. Their numbers suggest Americans spend 5 hours and 24 minutes per day (higher than the average listed above) and that the Philippines,Thailand, Columbia, South Africa, Argentina and Nigeria spend more time than that and Brazil is only slightly shy of the US number.
92% of Americans own a smartphone. 50% of all things accessed on the internet are done by smartphone.
The question now is what was everyone doing with those four or five hours a day before the appearance of the smartphone? Well, some must have been spending four hours a day watching TV or sitting at a computer during their leisure time. But it appears that even those who were unemployed or retired pre-smartphone (2011) spent just over three hours a day watching TV or sitting at a computer. [2] So in real terms, we are all eating into our “being” time with our consumption time having added another hour or two a day to screen time once smartphones showed up.
The research surrounding smartphone use by the chronically ill is a bit skewed around the panic associated with medical experience sharing in social media patient communities and how the medical industrial complex might engage with these patients. Therefore it’s not quite the right slice of what interests me associated with how the chronically ill use smartphones/online spaces for connection, information and entertainment.
For those with eating disorders, it appears as though it all depends:
“The participants noted many benefits these platforms [online community spaces from pro-eating disorder to pro-recovery] could provide; however, their ability to achieve the benefits was affected by their motivation for treatment. As a result, even platforms designed to support recovery could be used for illness maintenance.”
Here’s one dilemma I believe might be present for those with chronic illness: smartphone/online usage may denote health protective benefits of seeking support and information within patient communities and yet there are chunks of research devoted to the correlation of heavy smartphone use with increased anxiety, social anxiety and depression. Interestingly, one study does suggest that the correlation holds only if the smartphone usage is for non-social purposes.[4]
Furthermore, smartphones for gaming, video or shorts/tiktoks viewing appear very helpful for distraction from chronic pain. [5]
Exactly what you are doing when you are on your phone may be more the key to whether you are ratcheting increasing benefit or harm for you.
Moral Panic Through the Ages
I used to regularly debunk all the corporate human resources’ narrative surrounding the different ways in which various generations supposedly learn, work, attend to assignments at work, or whether one generation shows greater or lesser conscientiousness etc. Going back to the time of Socrates, youth have always been criticized for lack of industry, moral strength, focus and sense of responsibility. I would list a series of quotes about “today’s youth” that could all plausibly be uttered today and then reveal the dates at which they were actually uttered and yes, I could take it back in an unbroken line to the Roman Empire.
Much of the attention on generational differences just keeps the masses bickering with each other rather than turning their attention to the profound unity they all share when compared to the distance between them and the extremely wealthy (down through the Ages as well in fact).
Many of us worry about our smartphone usage these days. Many mainstream articles reinforce that concern we have about our “time wasting” ways. And it’s that presence of the media reflecting this concern that got me to thinking.
Have you ever found yourself thinking you should put down your phone and go read a book? Not so fast. Moral panic has infused all media at one time or another and the reason for this is how the media in question threatens the supremacy of the elite. [6]
“In short, the concern expressed by the media, by themselves, can both constitute as well as inflame and even generate public concern. In addition, media reports about a troubling phenomenon can influence concern among, and hence, the doings of, politicians, lawmakers, law enforcement officers, social movement activists, or what sociologists refer to as “moral entrepreneurs.” The mass media are both an independent manifestation of moral panics as well as a causal agent in firing up the other manifestations of moral panics, specifically public concern, political and legislative activity, and social movement activism. In short, the media are an expression of panics as well as their spark or cause. ”
It is possible that your smartphone usage needs a drastic reduction; it’s equally possible it does not and that propaganda is in fact nudging you to feel that you may be wasting too much time on your phone. Time wasting is the antithesis of productivity. Time wasting is also morally repugnant in a society that expects everyone to be a “productive member of society.”
If you need a break from your phone, take it. If you need to cull your Instagram viewing because you can meta-cognitively recognize that the images and marketing of the perfect beautiful existence at just the right weight with just the right hair is reinforcing all the wrong things for you, then do it. I am not suggesting that smartphones and the internet have no down side.
But there is also a reason that moral panic has attached itself to the medium of smartphones, as it once did with reading novels [8], radio, television and the internet. That the masses have direct access to information will forever be a threat to the elite of course. But the real concern for the elite is that while they benefit from your consumption while on your smartphone, they also need for that consumption not to interfere with your productive labour. But what you need and what the elite need are not the same thing.
There may be many things that your smartphone is bringing to you, including the amazing value of wasting time at times, that shouldn’t be thrown out. Not everything you do on a smartphone is consume, although yes of course much of it is tweaked and leveraged to guide you to do so because the capitalist elite requires it. Therefore the task here is not to cut your hours, or keep your phone out of the bedroom, or not take it with you everywhere, although feel free to do any of that too. The task is to assess what part of your phone usage is about connecting and learning then to maintain that part while reducing the consumption to a minimal level.
Anxiety Management, Today’s World and You
A smartphone, tablet, computer, TV are all the media through which you receive and evaluate so many different kinds of messages. The exercises and tasks in the previous section of this series are about culling and curating messages that ratchet anxiety in ways that put you in loops of excess consumption or push and guilt you into excess production. While maybe you need to excise the medium itself from your life, most of us benefit from taking a closer look at excising the messages and not the media.
Likely many of you have come across the oft used phrase “Don’t consume, create!” I have used it myself on many an occasion but I don’t anymore. I realize that the problem with this catch phrase is that it’s propaganda. It’s the gerbil wheel we all run on where “creation” has more to do with side hustles and excess productivity and less to do with hobbies and flow.
We need to work and to rest as human beings. We are, in fact, designed for the extremes of work and so-called laziness. We are not actually productive creatures; we are collective creatures. The problem we face in our modern world is that collective effort for lone benefit strips the value of the work from us. Today we work for the benefit of the elite and their excessive comfort and wellbeing. We are designed to work for the comfort and wellbeing of everyone.
“...work has always been with us, just one part of an intricate web of interdependent relations connecting humans to other humans, and humans to their local landscapes. The human body and its mechanical potential do not belong only to the individual but to society at large. Hunters bring large game back to camp in the full knowledge that they will lose it all. Today, many of us are doing the wrong kind of work, one that rejects sociality, craft and meaning, turning people into machines. In contrast, the physical, mental and social are inextricably linked in hunter-gatherer work. Modern life has been stripped of these connections, and compartmentalised for the sake of efficiency and comfort.”
By the way, the above quote from the article: Lessons from the Foragers is worth a read if you get the chance. It debunks the framing that there was an original affluent society and that hunter-gatherers only worked a few hours a day. Humans expend enormous amounts of energy getting and preparing food in hunter-gatherer societies, but they also rest hard. We have have lost the rest hard half of the equation in work hard/rest hard.
“Rest allows the very things that make us special as a species: the capacity to listen and think and daydream. Living among the Batek, I was always impressed by the ability of people to simply sit there and seemingly do nothing. What a contrast to our own society, where people would rather be shocked by electricity than sit alone with their thoughts.”
We won’t be returning to hunter-gatherer lives in our lifetimes and we must contend with our realities in the now, which is what this article here is about.
The Third Space
Consumption is not rest and production is not work. Being has to become your third space where you work and rest as a human being and not as a unit of capital benefitting the tiny segment of society that is our 1%. Yes, a good portion of your life in the modern world necessarily involves consumption and production and those spaces are not bringing any of us much comfort. It is important to whittle that down to the minimum that allows you your basics of survival and not much more. Why? Because you need to be in service of things that don’t actively want to use you and abuse you.
If you are disabled and not able to “be productive” in the service of capitalism by exchanging your labour for survival basics, then you already know things are very tenuous. I will need to address those living on disability in a separate post, but for now, just know that any moment you spend beyond the preoccupation of escaping poverty is a moment very well spent.
Work as Paracollective Parasitism
You’ve probably heard of the term: parasocial. Parasocial is an experience we all have when we have a connection to someone that we don’t know personally. Parasocialism is made possible through media. We can “know” a celebrity, or a fictional character, or someone in an online space and we struggle to differentiate that experience with knowing someone personally and directly. Parasocial relationships can trip us up because our brains weren’t designed to have a simulation of knowing people; we either know them or they are strangers.
I believe in one of my long format brain retraining series I discuss the parasocial relationships developed within corporate work settings where we often treat colleagues as personal friends only to discover that corporate demands will override that trust and loyalty almost every time. What I’ve come to realize now having read Vivek Venkataraman’s article quoted above is that all modern work settings are paracollectives.
As human beings work for the collective, it is that trait that is therefore leveraged in the service of the elite 1% in our world today. You may really love your job. Perhaps you are improving the lives and wellbeing of the clients you serve. Perhaps you feel tremendous appreciation and loyalty towards the team and the things you accomplish together. But you also know that in bad times, that connection could be quickly severed. That is paracollective. In a true collective, you would not be at risk of being “let go.” And yes, that would apply to you aging or becoming disabled, as the definition of your labour contribution in a true collective is far broader than that which is found in a capitalist system.
And as with parasocial relationships we can sink our commitment, loyalty and trust into these spaces and find ourselves supremely hurt and harmed when the simulated or manipulated piece (para) of the equation is revealed. Our struggle is that we all want to work collectively but our labour is not benefitting the collective in a capitalist system. Only the elite will benefit, and to a lesser extent their intermediaries in politics, government policy-making and executives near and at the top of the corporate hierarchies.
The parasite lodged in the entire system of modern work leverages the fact that we work for collective good so that this might be extracted for individual benefit.
As I mentioned, work in a true collective is broadly defined and also encompasses the entire arc of life.
“Until the age of 20, hunter-gatherer kids don’t pull their own weight, burning more calories than they themselves produce. But, once their skills are sharpened, they are extraordinarily productive, hauling in a surplus that would be widely shared.”
Let’s not romanticize paleolithic or neolithic living– there was no original affluent society. However, people with disabilities were not automatically thrown to the wolves and it is likely, when compared with our Eugenics 2.0 era we are in now, they were afforded a far broader definition of personhood and value in the collective than is available to all of us within our capitalist system today. [12],[13] Your ability to do and be things outside of your labour for money had more relevance in hunter-gatherer societies.
Your labour for money is one of the least valuable things about you even as it ensures the basics of survival in our world today. Your labour for money is an extraction from you in the absence of any collective benefit. Your consumption of goods for survival (shelter, food, clothing and transportation) is equally necessary yet extractive.
Minimizing not just your time on, but also your connection to, the paracollective labour you must provide in exchange for consuming the items necessary for individual basic survival, carves out some space for real work and real rest.
Collective, Communal, Intentional and Co-Living Communities
In the first two years of the ongoing pandemic, there was a huge surge of interest in communal living. Is the Boom in Communal Living Really the Good Life? is a Guardian article on the topic published in 2021, and Why communal living can make us happier is a BBC article from 2024 on this topic. Here in North America, the heartland of capitalism at its most ferocious, most articles focus on the huge anticipated boom of co-living builds as people can no longer afford the financial draw down of trying to own a home for any individual or even nuclear family. Similar to the boarding houses of the Depression era, co-living involves bedrooms that are separate and living, kitchen and dining areas that are communal. Co-living emphasizes individual lives unlike collective, communal and intentional living communities.
With few exceptions, most of these modern communal living arrangements (even when they happen to be in some of the original few communes that have survived since the 1960s) recognize the necessity of outside labour exchange for money for the residents, as well as for maintenance of shared structures and land supported by outside labour coming in.
There was much discussion on the forums of the desire for communal living space for those in recovery from eating disorders. The benefit of eating communally is tremendously protective of remission for those with eating disorders. Being in a collective space where everyone shares a desire to live beyond the strictures of consumption and production in our mainstream modern world can extricate people from the very things that entrench them in their eating disorder.
These options may or may not hold any appeal for you and they are plenty of other ways to integrate some real work and real rest into your life.
Real Work Real Rest
What does all this stuff about work and rest have to do with anxiety?
“Frictionless technology at our fingertips leads to the paradoxical situation of our smartphone screens becoming crowded with apps, our days increasingly divided into small things, and our attention shattered. Things that were meant to make our lives easier simply tempt us to put more things on our plates, increasing the amount that we work, and wreaking havoc on our wellbeing.”
The busier, more divided and more fractured our environment becomes, the more anxiety is elevated because the check-again loop needs to scan a more complex environment to try to ascertain whether any threat is present in that scene. We are not merely tempted by an easier life; we are actively manipulated by both marketing and propaganda to busy-fy our environments so that we consume more necessitating our increased indentured labour for production to support our outsized consumption.
Tall Poppy Syndrome
That human being can work for collective benefit is a trait. It can be leveraged for good or bad. In order for a collective effort to work, there needs to be a level of groupthink present to achieve the task at hand. Vivek Venkataraman references another anthropologist’s work as follows:
“Jerome Lewis described a Mbendjele forager who would have made an excellent capitalist: this man worked hard, too hard. He hunted all the time. He hunted so much that it started to bother his campmates. By hunting so much, it was said, he was elevating himself above others. He was eventually ostracised from the group.”
Tall poppy syndrome is an analogy to the human propensity to want to cut down to size someone who has outsized success or brags about that success – cutting down the tall poppy seen poking out above a sea of poppies. In our individualistic societies we see this as a bad thing harming the individual’s right to be exceptional. However, if we take the hunter example above, he is not just elevating himself above others, he is also over-consuming in the environment upon which everyone must depend. Sometimes, tall poppying is protective of the collective and for social primates not designed to survive well as individuals, this pressure on us all improves survival for us all.
When you choose to minimize your consumption and production that is in service to the capitalist elite, it’s important to keep tall poppy syndrome in mind. It’s likely wise to do so quietly, and for your behaviours on the surface to remain indistinguishable from the norm that surrounds you.
The paracollective and parasocial spaces are disingenuous but they are also generally accepted as real with the consequences of minimizing their validity being all too real. Let the emperor walk around naked without comment from you.
Focus your attention on carving out an ever widening space of being where you engage in real collective work and real rest.
How to Do Being
This space of Being is far more expansive and inclusive than what is available to almost all of us in the mainstream world of consumption and production.
Yes, it may involve an intentional community for you, but it could just as easily involve a very informal and minimal connection to some neighbours for sharing some tools or giving away some produce grown on your patio. It might be a community garden, or a theatre or music group. It could be absolutely anything at all where there is not an exchange of labour for money and so yes, that includes volunteer work. It can be the caregiving you provide in your own family. It can be solitary efforts of learning or studying (not formal education or accreditation efforts, but investigations and practice out of pure interest). It is time spent in nature. It could be journaling, daydreaming, watching wildlife or pets. It is both the space for work and rest as you define it.
The only important thing about Being is that it is not in addition to you as consumer and you as producer, it is actually carved away from the current space taken up by you as consumer and you as producer. At your centre is not consumption or production, it’s being.
While you may still answer the question “What do you do for a living?” dutifully with your current job title and responsibilities, in quiet and private spaces you internally answer the question: “While I do attend to consuming and producing at the minimum burn rate just enough that I a) don’t stick out, and b) can attend to my basic survival needs, I am nonetheless fully engaged in Being.”
As an eating disorder is an anxiety disorder, carving out the Being space is a very recovery-protective effort. I said earlier there is value to being a Sentinel in these times, but your ability to scan your environment for possible threats should be not clogged up with low-grade and very loud noise from marketing and propaganda. The Being space you create is devoid all that noise.
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