Maybe we've all lost the ability to deal with each other responsibly. To treat our actions and the actions of others as real rather than glitches in a cybernetic simulation. Maybe we've lost the sacred because we've lost the flesh.
In the old days, most trips were one-way trips, or likely one-way trips, because travel, the ultimate cost of travel, is not financial but risk. The cost of adventure was probably never coming back. Having to start over at the frontier. This is why the round trip in the Age of Exploration was one of the greatest possible inventions and accomplishments of man. Now the return trip is easier given, and tourism, global tourism, is considered to be a universal right almost at the level of speech or religion or sex.
This is fine, I don't begrudge anyone that right, but I wonder if there is any pleasure and indeed greatness without that risk, when the round part of the trip is built in from the beginning, when one is traveling to relax from the paralyzing effects of modernity, but still operating within the system of global modernity all the same, when the system is both toxin and cure.
Deep time—diving into deep time mentally,—is a release, because it engages the existential and eternal, from the pressure of shallow time, from the annoying NOW of 24/7 global time. The problem with global time is that it's always the middle of the day, the work day, somewhere.
There's no subjective local cycle of time: there's always interference from the other NOW of the rest of the world (which means that you wake up in the morning with interference from somebody else's evening, times a hundred).
Crypto markets are at a 24-7. There's a push to make the American stock market 24-7. Over the past few weeks, a number of stock traders have died at their desks. If the body lives in a 24-7 artificial telematic world for too long, it will die. That's the point. It needs sunset and sunrise.
If I really examine my responsibilities at the moment, I have no time to lose, no time to waste. In a lot of ways, I'm pretty fucked. I mean, I should be working constantly, but it's hard when I wake up to urge myself into that obsessive mode of work. I need some leisure and some time to relish a bit. Or I think I do.
What's leisure and what's work? What's wasted time and what's useful? If you think about it, modern eyes, my own eyes included, are not being used for their purpose. To look into the horizon, to be aware of predators, to detect, to track, to hunt and survive and to gather and find. They're being used to click, click, scroll, scroll. To pilot the brain through the internet.
Our subconscious visual reflexes are trained for the matrix, not the earth. Of course, you could say the same thing about reading. Reading a book is also retraining the eye for a non-primal task. But somehow, because you can write in a book, because you can put a book in your pocket, and because you can pick up an old book and return to it and it can be exactly as it was, and because a book occupies physical space, the cost of reading, on our own eyesight but more particularly our soul, seems somehow less. Or the trade-offs make more sense.
Plato was concerned that reading and writing could scramble the passage of the soul which beamed through the eyes into the world. And we should understand Plato's concern with the both poisonous and toxic and healing elements of reading and writing as similar to our relationship to the internet. The both extends and speeds up the activities of the soul but also weakens the eyes and weakens memory and weakens perception of the truth as a result.
Think about what happened to the earth between 1700 and 2000. Canals, roads, bridges, dams, superhighways, telephone lines, industrial plants, underwater cables, massive ports, airports, nuclear testing. In a microscopic way the same has been done to the human body. In many ways it will continue to be done.
The cyborg of the 2000s is like the industrialized landscape of the 1800s.
Very, very few people would consciously think of sacrificing a few drinks or a few cups of coffee for their favorite writer or artist. Consumerism absolutely comes first. Much of it absolutely wasteful, pointless and damaging.
In many ways sexuality has turned into tele-sexuality, love at a distance.