I told myself I needed the constant updates on Twitter to stay current in The Moment We’re In, but then I realized I had turned Twitter into a Faustian Bargain: If I got off Twitter I could focus on writing 1,000 words a day, and in doing so I could become a better person.
So here we are. I approach this project humbly because I spent the late 1980s, 90s, and 2000s writing novels and short stories. A handful of the short stories were to my mind very good and even had “necessary” essay-like quality about them. However, to be honest the novels were horrible and showed someone who is in the wrong game. It is one thing to have a strong writing skill, but that skill doesn’t necessarily translate into writing novels, screenplays, and other types of fiction. Looking back, autobiographical essays shaped into short stories have been my strong suit. This doesn’t mean that anyone reads my stories in significant numbers. I self-published some stories and fictionalized memoirs into electronic books and sold a hundred or so.
When I think of writing these pieces, I am sobered to say that I should have been more consistent in my writing. About a decade ago, I rationalized that I should stop because I was busy, the news cycle is crazy and requires that I stay on top of it through Twitter and online news sites. But honestly, I’ve gotten more addicted to the dopamine of quick bursts of news and social media feedback more than anything. The result is my brain and soul have become tattered more than they were to begin with.
As I begin this project, trying to stay away from Twitter and other addictive behavior, I think of a Jim Harrison line from his novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent: “The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” As MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle warns us, the little tweets don’t really add up to anything. All these little tweets are just another way to piss away our lives on nonsense.
We’re not just pissing away our lives. We’re fragmenting ourselves. My daughter’s math tutor, a brilliant computer coder, told me she suffers from smartphone addiction, looking for dopamine as she moves rapidly from one app to another, that has made her like a tiger pacing in a cage. Like me, she suffers from chronic depression, and she knows that online existence is throwing gasoline on the fire of this mental debilitation.
So I rationalized that I should quit writing because I had proven to be a failed novelist, my self-published writings didn’t sell enough or generate enough attention to justify the energy I put into my writing. I wasn’t getting enough juice for the squeeze. But merely writing these first 400 words or so is already more juice than all the time I spent online yesterday. I feel a certain shape in my interior landscape. I don’t have that jittery, fragmented feeling I get when I’m on Twitter all the time.
Twitter and online porn both have some things in common: The quest for dopamine and the resulting brain fog. Men who quit online porn and join the Nofap community encourage others to go on the 90-Day Challenge: see how you do by quitting porn, masturbation, and orgasm (PMO) for ninety days. They claim you will feel better. You will escape the brain fog.
I will say being online, even engaging with the political mess we’re in on Twitter, has a brain fog effect. Get into that fog long enough, and your soul begins to drown. You fall off Noah’s Ark and drown in the cesspool.
We have to use whatever tools and resources we have at our disposal to stay out of that cesspool.
So I used to have a more focused life when I wrote my failed novels. I liked who I was when I lived in that parallel universe of a fictional world more than the person who is grazing on Twitter all day and night.
The parallel universe I’ve lived in the last decade is what I call my Rupert Pupkin Universe. This is the narcissistic fantasy of being a star, a super human whose super qualities compensate for the true underlying sense of inadequacy.
The Rupert Pupkin Universe exists in two areas: One, my YouTube Channel where I mostly talk about wristwatches. It’s a place where I can show off my “wrist presence” in front of a video camera while I wear watches that I don’t have the opportunity to wear anyone else because for the most part I am a shut-in, a depressive recluse.
The other Fantasy World is my piano playing. I am an amateur pianist, and when I play I imagine I am performing for others who are absorbed by the beauty of my somber piano ballads.
These imaginary worlds, like social media, give me dopamine and a fleeting sense of connection, but this connection is for the most part counterfeit.
This Rupert Pupkin Universe is a sort of cesspool where I go to drown because like most of the human race I have fallen off the Ark.
We need to say this to each other with loving kindness, “Dude, you have fallen off the Ark.” This metaphorical language needs to be part of our common currency to explain that we’ve lost contact with reality and our moral sense.
So in using biblical language, notably from Genesis in the Old Testament, am I religious?
That is an excellent question. I am obsessed with religion. But am I religious? Do you mean do I believe that holy texts are inspired by God and that we must believe in their literal truth? And that some texts are holy and others are not?
I have read a lot of New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, and he makes the case that not all biblical texts are legitimate. For example, some of Paul’s letters were not actually written by Paul. Writers using Paul’s name wanted Paul’s authority to write screeds that put women back into their subordinate position after some of Paul’s authentic letters wrote that men and women were equal in Christ.
He gives other examples of New Testament writers trying to shoe-horn Gospel narratives into Old Testament prophecies, and how these writers did a horrible job of hiding their tracks, sometimes even mistranslating the Old Testament in their clumsy contrivances of fulfilling prophecy.
So am I a basher of religion? No. We are incurably religious. We all crave meaning and we all become our Higher Self through adherence to moral principles of compassion, sacrifice, integrity, and so on. I don’t tithe or give enough of my income to charity and maybe I should, so I’m not living financial sacrifice very well. I’ll confess I feel guilty about that, and I struggle with that.
I could talk about how morality doesn’t seem to exist in some exclusive realm of religion, how some atheists are just as moral as some Christians. I could point to one of my students, from Hungary, who said her father was an atheist who instilled a strong sense of morality to his children. This conversation came about when my students wrote an argumentative essay addressing Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” in which Anderson argues that societies develop morality through evolution and social reciprocity. Many behaviors attributed to God in the Old and New Testament, she claims, are morally abhorrent and therefore unless we cherry pick only the benevolent passages, we cannot look to codified religion for our best morality.
Religious or not, we must have a moral foundation. We must have a Moral Ark. I’m afraid that spending time on Twitter and other social media platforms pushes us off the Ark and we drown in the cesspool of outrage, information overload, dopamine, addiction, and scattered thoughts.
So I wonder what would happen if I wrote 1,000 words a day and composed at the piano rather than spend time indulging my Internet addictions. Therefore, I have started the 1,000 Word Project to see if I can steer my way back to the Ark.
