thethinkable

I joined Facebook in 2005 or early 2006, back when it was still a site that you had to be part of a university to join. There were only a dozen or so of my friends even on Facebook at the time. Over the next couple of years, I slowly saw my friends join one by one and before I knew it it was this huge thing. But I’m not on some hipster rant about how I’m cooler than you because I joined Facebook before you and left before you as well. This isn’t about that. This is about being honest with myself about why I needed to leave Facebook.

It happened when I was in the hospital.

More specifically, my daughter was in the hospital, and I was there with her. Over the years I had acquired a distaste from the mundane nature of Facebook and questioned its worth. I’m pretty sure most all Facebook users do the same thing. But I always stayed on the site because of some sick curiosity, disguised with excuses about how I wanted to stay in touch with my ‘friends’. I also wanted to remain in-the-know when it came to social networking so that I could help my daughter navigate its turmulous (I don’t think that’s a word, but it should be) and potentially life shaping environment as she goes through her awkward and vulnerable years.

I found myself checking my Facebook feed one evening while my daughter was in a coma on a breathing machine, and it sort of just smacked me in the face. What the fuck am I doing? Why do I care what some pseudo-friend of mine cooked for dinner? Why do I care about any of it at all? My life was so fucked up at that moment that the musings on Facebook seemed painfully unremarkable to me. So much so that I just couldn’t look anymore. I remember looking out the hospital window, and closing my Facebook app. So I cancelled my account right then and there, and I haven’t looked back.

This was June of 2013, which is over a year by now, and I have no intention of going back.

Months later, I came across this quote by Marcus Aurelius. Now, if you don’t know your history, Marcus was a roman empire from the year 161 to 180 AD. Yeah, a long time ago. He was a powerful emperor but also a stoic philosopher that left a lasting impression on humanity at the time, and arguably, even to this day. At least for me he has. Because the quote below perfectly describes why I left Facebook.

“Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbours, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming—in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the Ruler within you – means a loss of opportunity for some other task. See then that the flow of your thoughts is kept free from idle or random fancies, particularly those of an inquisitive or uncharitable nature. A man should habituate himself to such a way of thinking that if suddenly asked, ‘What is in your mind at this minute?’ he could respond frankly and without hesitation; thus proving that all this thoughts were simple and kindly, as becomes a social being with no taste for the pleasures of sensual imaginings, jealousies, envies, suspicions, or any other sentiments that he would blush to acknowledge in himself. Such a man, determined here and now to aspire to the heights, is indeed a priest and minister of the gods; for he is making full use of that indwelling power which can keep a man unsullied by pleasures, proof against pain, untouched by insult, and impervious to evil. He is a competitor in the greatest of all contests, the struggle against passion’s mastery; he is imbued through and through with uprightness, welcoming whole-heartedly whatever falls to his lot and rarely asking himself what others may be saying or doing or thinking except when the public interest requires it. He confines his operations to his own concerns, having his attention fixed on his own particular thread of the universal web; seeing to it that his actions or honourable, and convinced that what befalls him must be for the best – for his own directing fate is itself under a higher direction. He does not forget the brotherhood of all rational beings, nor that a concern for every man is proper to humanity; and he knows that it is not the world’s opinions he should follow, but only those of men whose lives confessedly accord with Nature. As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad , and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes, has no value for him.” – Marcus Aurelius

There’s a familiar phrase: Put your mind to it, and you can accomplish anything. I like what it means, but when I do, I also worry that too many of us don’t really appreciate what it means to put your mind to something. It sounds like some kind of self-help mantra laced with a bit of atta-boy attitude. But before we tell anyone else about what they should be putting their minds to, we should first ask ourselves what it means to put our minds to anything. We often think of the word ‘mind’ as if it represents our mental thoughts, or our soul, or somekind of combination of the two. It is the opposite of our tangible body. Our mind is our essence. Our brain is flesh, it is hardware, our mind is nebulous, it is our software. In this sort of duality, we are our mind.

But this attitude that our inner mental focus is the same thing as our mind both hides and illuminates something important; the fact that we can have control over our minds. And if it’s true, that we can control our minds, then we are not our minds directly, but rather, we are some sort of controller behind our minds. Our essence becomes something deeper, and our minds are an expression of that deeper essence. There is someone behind the curtains, and our mind is an extension of that someone just as much as our body is.

So when someone tells you to put your mind to it, they are really telling you to mind your own mind. This is very interesting, and most of us probably don’t mind our own minds all that much. Think about it for a moment. What did you put your mind to today? Did you wake up and put your mind to the task of showering and looking pretty for your day? Did you put your mind to your duties at your job? How much time did you spend minding your fantasies? Did you put your mind to the news of far away countries on CNN, or the trivial drama of your friends on Facebook? If you counted and tallied and created a pie chart of every moment where you put your mind in a given day, what would the categories and totals look like?

You may (or may not have) heard of the 10,000 hour rule  which states that if you put enough effort into something, that is, if you put your mind to it for 10,000+ hours on a single task or skill, you can achieve your greatest potential. Or ‘within a group of talented people, what separated the best from the rest was how long and how intently they worked’. I wonder, if you looked at your pie chart of hours of what you put your mind to, how many hours would be investments in your self? Investments in your future? Or how many hours do you just try and stay afloat? Minding about your next meal, your next beer, or your next cigarette? Are we in this modern technological jungle, really just mindless? After all, if you don’t mind what you mind,  maybe you have no soul at all. Maybe there is nothing behind the curtains. Just instinct like a cat pouncing on a string that moves, you click on the girl showing skin and let your mind tumble after.

We should mind our minds. We should metamind more often.