Untangling Life Purpose & Media

I've always preferred to experiment to discover what modes of thinking or experience work. For example, I experimented with tuplamancy for years with the ultimate conclusion that it's really just good for placating social lust. My recent obsession is media. Our whole world feels such an overload of media, active and passive, that it's far beyond the point of saturation. The experience in fact, becomes kind of sickening. There is the obvious culprits like your television, videogame, social media, and music, but also the more subtle such as advertisement, fashion, even ones urban environment, it's so overloading that it makes it the worse. Though never being a case of serious obsession, I felt I needed to see life with a total absence of media insofar as I could control this. "This is crazy," some would say: therein lays an idea that life without media is lesser, as if media is part of our life purpose. This just shows why this experiment is necessary; I needed to see that there is more truth in life without media. For some months I held true to this. At most, I read a book, usually about media criticism. I heard no music, watched nothing, played nothing, averted from advertisement. The experience was bizarre. It made me more aware of how plugged in every person is, all of them totally disengaged from their lives, becoming a node in an entertainment network. Heads filled with fake events spoken of with gravity, talking to avatars and representations all the time. In these months I felt such hatred of humanity that this is what they do. Why don't they come to the real life and experience what is under their noses? At that time I was attempting this myself, which is when I confronted the strangest thing of all. That there is no true experience, that in this real life there is nothing interesting. Most of all because everyone else is plugged in and you can't reach them. Even those people you think you're close to, family and friends, are a little too far for comfort. Another experiment completed. What's the conclusion? I don't really know. I feel I walked out the door into an Arctic blizzard, everything seems hidden away under deep sheets of snow. I walked around and just saw more stupid snow, turned around and walked back in. Is one supposed to stand out in the snow, subject to the beatings of nature? I am no monk who can bear such emptiness nor wants to. I do feel an extraordinary life and humanity come through the writings of cyberspace, through classic old video games and those greatest of films. There's bitterness in the fact that none of this should be necessary to placate oneself... At least I can understand why most of you guys I meet online are media addicts. In this world, how can you not be? Where can one have a more truthful experience of life? This is an invitation to suggestions, if any of you have some. Thanks for reading all this.

did u read machiavelli, nietzsche, carl jung, julius evola already?

>>95675 I have read the first two, am familiar with jung, and am not sure why your favourite authors are relevant. I'm more interested in your thoughts if you'd like to share any. Maybe my wording is too confusing, maybe I'm too far in my own head on this.

It explains why I can't meet people irl. There is no rl and there are no people.

>>95665 >Our whole world feels such an overload of media, active and passive, that it's far beyond the point of saturation. The experience in fact, becomes kind of sickening. There is the obvious culprits like your television, videogame, social media, and music, but also the more subtle such as advertisement, fashion, even ones urban environment, it's so overloading that it makes it the worse. Imagine (you) were the average person. You spend ~5 hours a day on the phone on social media and chat apps. You have earphones on constantly and listen to music all the time. On your free time, you play video games or watch movies. It would be very difficult to quit all media because it's irrational and everyone lives similarly. But let's say you decide to. No more anything. As a result, you have - a lot of free time you don't know what to do with - silence that you aren't used to - lack of meaning and boredom assuming you haven't found a way to immediately occupy yourself - things like exercise and books are now irritating because you're used to multitasking and self regulating emotional state with media - You might be missing something important like a call or message - No access to banks, work/school info, govt stuff, etc - you are 15 seconds away from going back to the usual on your phone or computer >I feel I walked out the door into an Arctic blizzard So, due to boredom, irritation and loneliness, as well as necessity, you would 100% go back to using media. Okay then, screw everything. let's lock my devices somewhere far away. Now you have to kind of make your own living infrastructure, to replace everything your phone and computer does for you, as well as decondition yourself from easy dopamine hits. Which is difficult and no one can do it for you. Personally the biggest problem is deconditioning. After quitting most internet garbage, somedays I just can't find a good reason to wake up in the morning and sleep all day. Everything is mildly painful and irritating. >Is one supposed to stand out in the snow, subject to the beatings of nature? I guess what you would have to do is to lock your house and make an igloo, but living in an igloo is like kicking dead whales down the beach, so you have to build a castle out of snow and invite some eskimos or something until you no longer want to return >Where can one have a more truthful experience of life? It doesn't exist anymore so you have to make it yourself

>>95676 nta, have you read Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media? It may present a grey area to you that didn't present in your op. There's no reversion back to bushman, no un-knowing. Forward. Unplugging and finding nothing, could mean there is a deeper change yet to be made within yourself. The hatred you feel for humanity seems like projection of hatred towards yourself, otherwise, maybe you wouldn't have walked into such a desert.

I can no longer tell who I am talking to, who I am playing with, or what I am watching is AI generated or not. IS it some third worlder/obsessed retard? Very hard to tell. Elon has recently exposed that most identity politics and ragebait you see on Xitter is posted from third world countries. Poeple from SEA, Europe, US frequently post about the supposed immigration crisis in Japan that I don't see when I step outside. My timeline is drowning in this bullshit because Elon is paying people for user engagement. I have spent enough time in competitive online games to know that most of the time *people* in my lobby are now actually bots. I have seen enough media to know that there will be not many surprises in what I watch and they will not offer anything interesting. I hate anime and the bullshit time filler it has become. With these in mind, I can no longer find value in time staring at a screen. It used to be so that I could connect to strangers on the internet without social pressure, and that's why I liked the internet. With some exceptions (the communities that I have found), it no longer offers that value. When I internalized that most stuff you see on the internet is fake bullshit whether it has to do with politics or AI generated content I naturally started spending less and less time in front of my computer. This was enough for me to deprogram. You are asking what should be done instead of wasting your life away on your phone, and my answer to that is it depends on you. We all have very different lives and what works for me will not work for you. You have to figure out the most of it yourself. My general advice would be that you don't have to completely go off-grid and can use your devices to talk to people that you already know in person. Beside that, I don't think the internet, the social media, any online competitive game, or mass produced media offers any value in any person's life anymore, granted that you can be alone with your thoughts.

>>95680 >nta, have you read Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media? I'm on the 28th chapter right now, it's been transformative. Note that in the OP this 'experiment' is a period of some months that already ended some time ago, but my stance on things is subject to radical change. There's no real contention or conclusion in what I wrote, just throwing things out and wondering what will come back, what other people think. >>95679 It's a shame we are separated by land and ocean, you know exactly the feelings I have and have very similar thoughts to me, even ones I didn't mention in the post, in particular: >things like exercise and books are now irritating because you're used to multitasking and self regulating emotional state with media The point on 'emotional regulation' is one I noticed when I see everyone on the street walking with earbuds all the time, but of course all media contributes to this. Music is just the most convenient because audio has strong emotional effect and it doesn't disturb the visual sense, i.e you can have it passively affecting you while doing other things.

>>95665 I personally think the "solution" to this (or more specifically, the answer to the question of "Where can one have a more truthful experience of life?") is something you've already manage to point to by implication. I'm pretty sure you very intentionally linked the OP image from the movie Dinner With Andre, and I think they already answered your question: you experience a more 'truthful' life by living life more intensively, excitedly and intentionally. If I recall correct, the movie came in the 1980s, which is also the time that began to immerse itself more totally in entertainment and other illusions (which is partly what the movie tries to address). Coincidentally that same decade a guy called Klapp wrote a nice, highly informative book called Overload and Boredom - Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society. There he addresses the issues that began to emerge with the rise of the Information society by pointing out that although there's a lot of information everywhere constantly, people still feel tired, bored and overloaded. In short: there's a ton of informational noise, but little to no meaning (because it takes time to build). In big cities we don't interact with other people as we used to do in rural areas, because everything around them has already overloaded people, so the minimum energy they want to use on something is in regards to things they care or find meaningful, so nothing much happens "spontaneously" (unlike before), because we've demarcated and carved out areas where you're meant to do any specific task (wanna have exciting experiences? there's the movie theater and amusement park, go scratch that itch and come back later!, wanna get the bucks? Well, here's the working area, and remember, no unnecessary buffoonery and silliness outside designated breaks!). Before the Information society, people used to find or invent tons of activities and fun stuff to do by themselves, because - outside necessary potato field work and cattle herding - there was pretty much nothing *but* time. That's why there used to be even in small towns active music clubs, people who wrote and published self-made news papers, acting groups and skiing and hiking trips with your co-workers from the local grocery shop. I don't mean to romanticize this too much: of course they didn't just have fun all the time, because in a small town you have to put in a lot of effort in order to keep everything running, especially if the town is in the middle of nowhere. That meant there had to be a lot of skilled workers residing the town locally, which also meant you had to engage with people more often, especially face to face, and one to one, rather than as a faceless mass put on a line like in a Fordist conveyor belt assembly line in order to get the job done as efficiently as possible. This somewhat also ties in with the reason why, outside social media and the Internet, it feels like you're walking in the ice plains of Antarctica, having to endure the relentless and cold blizzards: the one part that makes us humans is, of course, our language, specifically, interacting with other humans in a meaningful way. That's hardly what's happening these days. Sure, we utter words and write symbols that we throw at people, but ask yourself, when was the last time you laughed or joked around with the cashier at your local supermarket? To want to make someone laugh or amused means you're aware of someone's humanity (as cliched and cringy as that might sound) and intentionally desire to relate to someone. I bet the last thing you want to do in a supermarket is "relate to someone". No, you go in, get what you need, and storm out, like everybody else. There's nothing personal, hardly anything meaningful, if even "semantical" about any of this. You won't get to know the cashier, and even if you do, it's no guarantee you're going to see him or her every day - one day the employees might get fired or just move elsewhere, with no chances of doing the "goodbye" rituals. What I'm getting at with this rant is basically what >>95679 already said: if you want to have a more meaningful or 'truthful' experience of life, you can't expect to find it "out there", if you see what I mean. Not anymore, thanks to Industrial Society and its consequences. Instead, you're going to have to make it yourself. Yes, here's the paradoxically, circular logical irony in all this: if you want to build a summer garden in the middle of the arctic wasteland, you're going to need people - or the eskimos - to "decorate" and populate it with meaningful things, but you can't do this if everyone else would rather just not voyage to the Antarctica when they could instead stay at home to slurp the slop they pop right into your lap with a mere click of a button. When there's too much convenience and no real reason to interact with people, because we no longer need each other for much of anything, then we would rather just isolate from others, according to the dictates of the 101 market logic: if the cons (losses) are greater than the pros (profits), then why bother? But that bothering exactly is the one aspect that somewhat makes things meaningful. At that point, as Jung (in paraphrase) said, the one thing left to do is watering your own garden and hope that it brings forth strange enough plants that you maybe could grab the attention of the eskimos and then maybe peak their curiosity in your "truth project."

>>95665 I just want to thank you for this thread. I have also been having similar thoughts on the importance of experiments. >>95679 >It doesn't exist anymore so you have to make it yourself This feels very true to me. Thank you too anon. I'm sorry that I don't have anything to add myself. I just want you two to know that there are more people out there who think this way.

>>95682 >With some exceptions (the communities that I have found) Would you mind sharing some of these communities here?

Since I made this thread I've variably kept true to this goal, and at other times loosened, seeing which is a better mode of life. This experience has served only to confirm that Baudrillard was correct about society and the simulacra. Disengaging only puts you into this free-wheeling limbo, and certainly did not make me happier, while being less pleasant. I need to admit I've been quite escapist lately, and feel less will to resist this, and in turn feel quite bitter about it all. I don't know what to do now.