50 ways TO YOUR LEAVE LOVER
Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction
The poet Paula Meehan described a writing workshop given by John McGahern, in which he advised the group that they should write with the table to a blank wall — it would give them some chance, at least, of avoiding the many distractions which were bound to break their concentration, and endanger the work.
McGahern was giving this advice in 1979, and the distractions he was thinking about were the sort of things that might emerge in the course of a normal day in Leitrim. And yes, a lot of things can happen in Leitrim which might distract you for a few minutes, but even the maddest day up there would surely seem like a vision of tranquility next to what we are dealing with on any day, in any place, in 2018.
Moreover, the distractions which McGahern was trying to avoid would be of the naturally occurring kind — maybe just a tractor passing the house, or a postman coming to the door. And yet he warned of their disruptive potential, because he had this acute awareness of how hard it is for the mind to switch itself off from these everyday engagements, just to get some rest. Only in this resting position, as it were, can you find that connection with the subconscious, which is essential for the release of the creative spirit.
The needs of the human mind haven’t changed a great deal since 1979, but of course the distractions which are now available have multiplied to a spectacular degree. And, crucially, they do not lie in wait for you any more, or disturb you by accident, they are out there looking for you all the time, hunting you down, inviting themselves into your head and refusing to leave.
In recent weeks, we have seen the writer Natasha Schull explaining that Facebook and Google are using methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites. Just as slot machines and other
“Distractions do not lie in wait for you any more, they are out there looking for you”
such systems are designed to be addictive, so the scrolling mechanisms on our news feeds, for example, create a similar kind of psychological craving.
Scholl explains that you get drawn into “repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback — and the rewards are just enough to keep you going”.
Like the online bookies, the socialmedia sites want your money, and to do that, they need a piece of your soul, or maybe a lot more than a piece.
Intuitively, we know they are out to get us, we know that we are under distraction-attack all the time in ways that even John McGahern never imagined. We know that we are in a state of deep addiction to several of the basic tools of living — that they have long since passed the utilitarian stage, and that they are gobbling up large portions of our personalities. But knowing it doesn’t mean that we know what to do about it.
No pill, no drug, nothing is as relentless as the torrents of ‘content’ pouring through the screens deep into our brains — at least with the drink, you’ll have a physical need to stop for a while; you might even stop for a whole month. But with the “content” there is no Dry January, no going off it for November, or at least it’s so unusual that if anyone succeeds in doing it, they tend to write an article about it. Long read.
So when we see that a lot of young people are suffering from anxiety, in ways that young people never suffered from anxiety before, we should ask ourselves how it could be otherwise, when just being alive and being able to function at a rudimentary level now comes with this guarantee of addiction.
Yet there are great possibilities too, if you can somehow follow the teachings of McGahern in whatever you do. If you can “write with the table to a blank wall”, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. `