On Modern Living/Wonka-vators

I am quite tired of it.

I often have a nightmare that finds me in a tornado, the detritus of my life spinning all around me in a vortex while I am suspended in the middle of it all safe yet ultimately unable to escape. The general feeling is one of being overwhelmed by all that is flying past: memories, scattered thoughts, observations from recent days, concerns.

I have another that came to me last night. I am in a small hotel room that is not unlike my own apartment when someone is able to enter. This stranger claims they were informed by the hotel manager that the rooms were over-booked and that they ought to ask myself whether they may pay me for their portion of the room. I am powerless again in the face of both the number and size of the others who begin to file in without invitation.

It is worth noting that such dreams often come to me when I have spent the prior day thinking too much on topics that sit squarely outside of the sphere of my own life. As someone who lives very much within my own little world, the sheer scale and negativity of news from the world outside fills me with the same emotions inspired in my aforementioned nightmares. We are only able to sit in a little box looking at everything rushing by as they happen. It is like being in the glass elevator in Willy Wonka’s factory.

We flit and fly about society by pressing buttons that take us to wherever we could possibly want to go, but never being able to touch, talk, or interact with these places–we may as well be consuming them through a screen. Like mimes we are trapped in our glass boxes. When you go to enough places, one begins to try to exit our glass elevator, only to find that it is not only extraordinarily expensive, but once outside of it many of the people about you are still inside of their own. And so, as one who lives outside of his box now–I am no longer able to go wherever I like, while also still largely being unable to chat with the majority of people, who stay in their glass boxes.

Of course, there are many for whom the glass box was never a natural place to be. I find people who are older than myself tend to fall into this category. I was born in the early 90s, and while many of my peers and those younger than myself have transitioned to living in Wonka-vators, the older generation have largely retained the ability to connect. My best conversations in recent memory have exclusively been with older people. Boomers and Gen X’ers without social media are some of the most alive people I’ve ever spoken with. There is no pretense, and so it is easy to reach out and touch them.

With this in mind, I find myself drawn to art and works made by older generations. It is not uncommon for me to visit the Museum of Metropolitan art here in New York City to escape into the radiant collection of humanity on the inside. I feel I am in conversation with the artists inside by proxy. There is a truer translation of thought and emotion into a human medium than what seems to be generally available today. One senses a creation that is meant for no other purpose than to communicate an ideal, and the absence of compromise for the sake of market palatability.

Modernity is overwhelming while also being incredibly bland. We are given wars without glory, suffering without nobility, thoughts without emotion, and emotion without thought. Our society lives at the extremes of human emotion and action and views them as virtue, while the true goodness of the moderation found in the center is seen as “boring” or worse, unprofitable.

I aim to break from modernity. I want to sever any channels through which its marionette string may stick to my skin. I want to take in only the good, and the human. I want to be “unprofitable” in that I want to stop contributing to the spectacles of society by either creation or consumption. My goal is to know myself. Too many feel that the proxy omnipresence of being online/in a Wonka-vator helps to achieve this end, but the reality is that it makes us vignettes of what is profitable. True existence, true self realization is the opposite: it is monolithic.

So how to break from modernity? How does one step outside of the box? The answer is simple–guard your mind and begin by sitting in silence. In the same way we do not eat what we cannot digest, we must do the same with our thoughts: we should not consume what we cannot ponder. Consider whether the format, the medium, the context of your life allows for this.

Some prime examples of junk-food for our minds: YouTube videos watched in succession, reels, self-help books passively read and never applied, pornography, poorly written books, social media feeds, advertisements.

Some examples of what is healthy for your brain: classical philosophy, classic literature, conversations with friends, classic movies, museums, writing essays, writing journal entries, approaching your interests scientifically…

Not entirely sure how to end this, so I’ll leave things here.