Facebook

"Hello, my name is Kat. I am a facebook addict." And the world nods back at me, “Hello Kat. Welcome.” I blush crimson with shame—acknowledging my inner desire for human contact, to connect with others, yet have succumb to accepting the drivel with only a mere 150 facebook friends—most of whom I don’t even know. In the mix, family, a few old close friends, a few newer friends I cherish and the balance representing business clients, and complete strangers who share some relationship to friends with others whom I don’t know.

A bit like a block of Swiss cheese with a preponderance of holes, well over the maximum that creates an integral block—imploding without a manageable form, into a collapsed colourless mass of coagulated cultured whey. "Perhaps even without culture," I mutter to myself.

My own guilt, driven by a contemporary lifestyle of mobility, the mass movement resulting from industrialization— that moment we left our hunter gatherer posture and moved into the agricultural phase. In the words of Derek Jensen, and I paraphrase, “Our newly enamoured ownership of property—animals, land, the woman, a place to acquire from which to come and go."

Fast forward to 2018. While a newly unfolding new year, it is a far different world from 2017. Everything is ramped up—communication and medical technologies on the top of my list of awarenesses. While a few folks still travel to visit family and friends to keep their relationships familiar and fertile with one-on-one conversations, hugs, kisses, touching hands, witnessing the "ah haws," sharing stories with actual eye contact, feeling the warmth of one another in close proximity and sharing those guffaws in person, those of us who have moved many times, have dear friends and family spread out to far reaches of the globe. Getting together pushes at resources and time like an elastic band stretched to its extreme physical capacity. Any further, and its polymer will fail and snap apart.

Friends of friends of friends of friends. Building a platform—

To compensate for our disconnection to our family and friends, to promote our books to be launched by the hungry publishing company who already has more than they can use to ensure their profit. They ensure that the author develop the audience to concretize their profit—after all, it never was about quality, was it? Never in friendship or perpetuating the family. Regarding friends, in the words of poet, Robert Frost, “we can count the true number of friends on one hand—the rest are acquaintances.”

Yet our mobility, our human capacity to share ourselves with others, our passion of writing, storytelling, philosophizing our ever-widening capacities to embrace life to its fullest, opens us to countless close and intimate opportunities to engage with friends. Certainly more than even two hands can mark. And each one, if we apply a spiritual teaching, is an opportunity to love more deeply, with compassion, energetically. And we know that we have been spiritually deficient over the past 200 years compared with many countries. India being a rational example.

Carl Jung spoke to our neuroses developing when we left nature—cutting our self off from our oneness with our origins—warring—and the resultant mental and emotional confusion that situates dis-ease within our own psyche, and therefore, within our physical bodies.

“Hello, my name is Kat. I am a facebook addict.”

Kat

18 February 2018