The Panasonic Dream

 The frenetic pace of modern life has led to many people checking out. 

We feel we have no anchor to hold onto any longer. Our jobs feel mechanical, our relationships formulaic. We don't don't have the time to even figure out our "why?", even  to a point where we start to disbelieve the idea of a "why?", an overarching purpose, a genuine foundation to all our dreams. 

If you relate to this, it might come as a consolation that almost everyone is feeling a similar way. But this doesn't solve the problem.

 It just diagnoses it.  

To solve the problem needs your attention. Not only figuratively, but quite literally. 

Our attention has been stolen from us by marketing and branding and all the things - not least the trillions of dollars -  that go into "making the world go round" and end up suffocating us.

When ants engage in a death spiral, they follow a trail of pheromones laid down by the few. This happens in an overcrowded situation which confuses a few, and then progressively becomes the new norm as more and more join the twister. 

When we think of those few ants leading the overcrowded pack, the Mark Zuckerbergs  and the cast of zany characters like Bezos, we realize that we're falling into their pattern. In fact, we're probably already deeply ingrained in it. I didn't mention one company here because they're the ones who make this blog viable. But suffice it to say, we  realize deep down that that this "new normal" as they love to term it, is really a never-ending spiral of confusion that can engulf our entire lives. 

The Panasonic dream is the title of this post because it speaks to a second-rate product that a life can sometimes become. Your life is no longer the Sony or Apple that you once dreamed it would be. It's the derivative product. The cheapest copy-cat in the room. This speaks to a situation when you don't have the ability to lead your own path; So you simply copy someone else's. 

There are many reasons for this, but we need to start at the idea of a network, which is where the trouble began, and work backwards. 

In one of Jordan Peterson's lesser known observations, he points out that we're always outsourcing our knowledge-making tools to someone else. If we didn't do this, our heads would be aflame with millions of doubts. 

Living in complex society requires a sophisticated system of continuous signal-sending and signal-awareness. If we're out of tune with society, we're out of tune, to some extent with the reality of the world as it is. 

"So this is your solution?" You might be asking. "A deeper engagement with the society that messed up my signals in the first place?" 

And to be honest, this was what I thought Peterson was inferring too. But that simply isn't the case. The reality is that, while we live in the world, we don't have to make our hearts a denizen of it. 

That is to say, we don't have to derive our meaning, hopes and purposes from it. We simply have to use it to gauge what's out of line in everyday interactions with the society. This, among other reasons, is because we can't change people, much less society without first engaging to some degree in their rules. 

The Antidote, then isn't so much changing the social mores. It's about something that's lacking. 

If we can get to what that thing is, we stand a chance to pull ourselves out of the death spiral. 

What is that thing then? 

In a nutshell, it all comes down to our attention and where we place it. Right now, our attention is absorbed in a mindless loop of things that don't concern us; Be they online forums or tik-tok videos, which line the very bottom of the attention-stealing barrel. 

The thing then, is a deeper engagement in what McLuhan calls cool media. This includes books and older movies that aim not so much to indoctrinate, but to question things. 

This is also why, on waking up, we need to tap into a network from a place before things went horribly wrong. 

That means having a connection of old books. Be they Tom Sawyer or Dale Carnegie, or most noteworthy of all, the Bible. These are our old lost connection and our old roots. Then there is the old connection with the soil and the sea. 

As it stands, we're going about things the wrong way. But we can change that. We can make a firm decision each morning to read something, to write something, or to do something that opens us up to higher and greater possibilities; a place of really questioning - which is hard. 

The alternative is to have things fed to us in an endless loop. And this, to say the very least, is looking through things from the wrong end of the telescope.