Our Destination Precedes Us

Our Destination Precedes Us

A Simpleton's Reflection on Being Human in the Digital Age

I was on a walk over the weedy, wild-flowery hills overlooking the lake near my home in Switzerland. I think it’s maybe the most beautiful place to walk in the world. For some reason today I was thinking about how much time I, and all of us really, spend on digital platforms.

Perhaps specifically because I was walking, smelling fresh air, feeling aware of my physicality such that the contradiction of digital experiences was laid bare, seemingly out of nowhere a string of words formed before me:

I do not have legs so that I might sit.

The disarming profundity of that sentence caused me to catch my breath. I felt a lump in my throat and stopped walking. Not because I chose to but because a rapid string of subsequent thoughts cascaded quickly behind those words, making good on the instant recognition of some intuitive truth.

I’m not very sophisticated. I don’t read enough to know who may have written life’s universal observations before my pea brain happens by them. Only that I know someone before me, countless probably, surely had such thoughts and wrote more eloquently about them than I ever could.

And yet I was immediately haunted by my version of the moment.

Disoriented, I looked at my hands and had an out of body experience.

Hands are so odd. Aren’t they? Look at them. Branching into fingers. Connected to arms. And they to torsos. So peculiar and specific.

What strange things we are. Humans. Cleaved in places, elongated in others.

In that moment I was briefly removed from the culture and concerns of people, looking abstractly at my physical form. Like when you repeat a word so many times it loses meaning and becomes unrecognizable, but here it was the opposite. The meaning, or at least a new, resonant meaning suddenly bloomed into focus, whereas all the minutes, hours, days and years before it, all occupied by concerns of careers and politics and brands and oddly arbitrary preferences and goals, all suddenly seemed to exist in a cloud of unimportant abstract nonsense.

Fine, maybe I was having a 40-year-delayed acid flashback.

Possible.

Either way, through it I saw, or recognized again, an elusive truth that I must have contemplated before, but probably never as seriously and surely without such heightened certainty and resolution, that I was indeed and inexorably an integral part of the Earth. My form suited to this place in its own, perfect way. Ideally so. To this exact place.

I became aware that I have attached to my neck a head with a jumble of senses attuned in perfect symbiosis to take in data that this plane throws off.

I have a mind and emotional responses tuned optimally to process in sync with life here, and to engage meaningfully with other real biological people, not their digital shadows. People who, like me, crave touch, reassurance, companionship, joy and love - the organic fulfillment of living.

I marveled at the implication that our bodies are perfectly suited to hugging.

“Created” or “evolved” became unimportant to me. It doesn’t matter.

Whatever.

Physically speaking, it is what it is.

“I am what I am”

I reflected on the fact, on my original thought, that we absurdly spend our days severing ourselves from this world that we are so optimally configured for, in favor of a place with lower resolution, because though small and digital, it delivers the attraction of control, and so every effort is expended there to undo the inconveniences associated with these bodies in their natural world. Every new action intended to increase stimulation and diffuse every itch.

But try as we might, this immersion in digital unreality is doing our real selves a fundamental disservice. Denying the truth of our very improbable physical existence.

Denying that THIS is what we are. This. And that this does not change. No matter how far you push the change around yourself, you are still, and will always be, until your last day, just this.

Until maybe, someday, we try to change even that. As if. As if our little brains will ever know enough to know better than the infinite eons that put us here.

I recognize that we are tool makers and users, the collision of our intellect and drive to survive. If we can’t will the universe into submission, maybe we can outthink it. But we dim witted humans, we don’t know when or why to stop. We have proven that time and time again. So obsessed are we with lifting ourselves from the filth, chaos and misery, that our sense of objective progress is lost to a sea of dispersed, relative increments. Our quest for upward progress insatiable. We reduce life’s natural, built-in requirement for effort, and automate our access to food and otherwise naturally hard-won necessities to such an orgiastic degree that obesity becomes epidemic.

My grandmother, in perhaps the most repeated grandmotherly comment in history, once told me, “Too much of anything is bad for you”. She also said, “Welp, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” so take it with a grain of salt.

The point is, there is a threshold past which we will have adjusted our environment or days and possibly our very selves to be so far from our truth, so far from these finite bodies and organic minds, so far away from what we really are, that our trajectory will inevitably be a version of downward and destructive. Even if we have managed to stimulate our pleasure centers into distraction from the fact.

Even mere consistency would seem excruciating to one who has only felt pleasure.

If, in this life, we exist on a kind of Zeno’s path, always halving the distance to where we wish to be but never arriving, maybe rather... maybe we are meant to suffer. To feel pain too. To face challenges and chaos in some balanced measure. To lack control to such a degree that we do experience sadness and grief. We embody the attributes necessary to accommodate these things. Perhaps it’s folly expressed through the countless incremental digital interfaces, controls and selves we inexhaustibly build to remove all suffering once and for all, whereas rather wishing something isn’t so, is what we are best.

Maybe today we are facing that progressive crest beyond which we get worse.

Or maybe there never was any such thing as better in the first place, and acceptance is all we lack.

I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer.

I only know this:

I do not have legs so that I might sit.