1000-yard Stare
The "thousand-yard stare" is a blank, unfocused gaze caused by dissociation. It happens when the brain psychologically disconnects from reality to cope with acute stress, emotional exhaustion, trauma, or sensory overload.
While I was walking through the city today, sitting on public transport, watching people at a café, I noticed that even those not staring down at their phone, had a kind of blankness to them, like they were disassociated with their surroundings.
Have they seen too much?
I suspect not.
But I also think that it is taking less and less for people to be "traumatised" in life, where every little slight, every negative emotion is turned into an event that impacts on them, no matter whether it is important or not. It is like we have forgotten how to evaluate, rand and prioritise our experience. Whatever is in our attention right now, is the most important thing in the world.
And it is perhaps because our attention is caught up with so much meaningless junk, we don't have enough to spare to look at our world, to notice other people, or to actually work on the things that are important to us. Because we put so much effort into all of the meaningless, we have nothing left to spend on what matters - and it wears us out, it "traumatises" us.
Attention is the most important resource we have, because it is something that we choose to direct and, where we direct it is where we are going to experience. Yes, we can experience things unconsciously, but our conscious experience is directed by what we point our attention at. Whether it is to build a new skill, or to be immersed in a movie, to hear the background instruments in a song, or appreciate some art - it is our attention that gives rise to our experience, and our memories of it.
But I think that so much of our attention gets spent on passive consumption that influences our thoughts to focus on what we are told to focus on, that we have forgotten how to direct it ourselves. We get "bored" unless there is something outside of us keeping us entertained, keeping us consuming. And it isn't only the children who have grown up on screens that experience this, because many of my friends who were raised in an analogue world, are now much like their kids, if not worse. At least the kids have been conditioned as children to be consumer robots. The adults today, conditioned themselves.
How much of our life is spent staring at a screen?
And what are we getting in return for it? Sure, there is the work-related activity on a screen, sitting behind a desk, pretending to read a spreadsheet. But what of the non-work entertainment activity that teaches us at best trivia? While you can start on the road to skill development through books and screens, at the end of the day, skills are built actively.
Well, that is not true.
Everything we do is building a skill, it is just that the skills we are building through staring at a screen are not the ones we would want to build, as they bring no value.
Calluses on the arse cheeks, rather than the hands.
But I was thinking about this today as I watched other people and was wondering what it would be like if I could see myself traverse the city from the outside looking in. Would I look any different to the masses of others?
Maybe not.
Maybe.
Taraz
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