Tag: Social Media

Making Moments Count

I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s book on confronting our fears, a chapter each morning to begin my day and make it a better one.

In this morning’s reading, he tells of a woman who bought a Buddha statue at a flea market. When she brought it home, her small house offered no fitting place for it, so she set it on top of her television. When Thich Nhat Hanh later visited and saw its placement, he gently said, “Dear friends, the statue and the television don’t belong together. The Buddha helps us return to ourselves; the television helps us run away from ourselves.”

I don’t watch much television myself, but I know many who do. It so often serves as an escape—from the long day’s tensions, our restless anxieties, the quiet unease of being alone with ourselves. Such passive indulgence rarely nourishes us. It neither challenges nor enlarges us.

Today it’s not only television that distracts us. Social media reaches even deeper, its many tentacles drawing us outward until we lose touch with the stillness within. Life’s current slows; we grow older, dormant in our ways, awakening too late to realize we’ve traded what’s genuine for a shallow imitation.

—rj

Hungry to Connect: The Addiction That Plagues Us

“Look at all the lonely people,” the Beatles sang in their haunting “Eleanor Rigby.”

You’ll find them not only in bars but, much more these days, glued to their TV screens and 24/7 social media, hungry to connect.

It’s the true addiction that plagues us.

Cultural critic Ted Goia—12 books—writes perceptibly of our mania to whittle our way out of our daily ennui via screen subservience, unwitting of the corporate entities feeding our habit:

“No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies. It’s not even close.

“… screen media providers will never tell you the truth about the screens themselves. These interfaces appear—falsely!—as innocent and without agenda. But just follow the money trail, and it’s not hard to figure out what’s really going on.

“The richest people on the planet are the ones who control our screens. That doesn’t happen by coincidence.

“If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us—at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection” (“David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us,” Substack, Sept. 26, 2025).

Goia quotes the late literary genius, David Foster Wallace, who didn’t own a TV, knowing his susceptibility to its mind-numbing allure:

“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.…At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money(Interview with David Lipsky, Rolling Stone, 1993).

By the way, I’m planning to read everything Wallace wrote—the short stories, the essays, his magnus opus, Infinite Jest and unfinished The Pale King.

Prescient and mesmerizing, he deserves nothing less.

rj

Should I Leave? Confronting Social Media

It’s with risk one voices an opinion on media these days, especially with FB, X, and Tik Tok swarming with heated blurbs hurled at those whose opinions run contrary to their own.

I’ve toyed, like my daughter, with abandoning FB, not only for its myriad inflammatory posts, but for its subjecting me to an onslaught of advertising memes. I don’t like being tracked.

I continue with FB only because of friendships made over the years. I don’t want them severed.

Not least, I hold memberships in several groups that have greatly helped me in their counsel and sharing of interests.

But the temptation to slam the door on media, nevertheless, remains strong. I think the Internet, in general, can be an unsafe place, affording anonymity to the mischievous and those just plain angry with life.

Lately, I’ve discovered that AI itself, sometimes useful to retrieve detailed info, can be programmed with bias, not only for what it yields, but for what it omits.

But back to media, I appreciated Sam Harris’ recent Substack piece, “We are Losing the Information War with Ourselves.” I’ve always admired his level-headed, spot-on appraisals of our human dilemmas, and suggesting their best remedies.

Space confines my commentary, but Harris rightly observes that “There is no party of murder’ in this country. And insisting that there is just adds energy to yet another moral panic. Social media amplifies extreme views as though they were representative of most Americans, and many of us are losing our sense of what other people are really like. Many seem completely unaware that their hold on reality is being steadily undermined by what they are seeing online, and that the business models of these platforms, as well as livelihoods of countless “influencers,” depend on our continuing to gaze, and howl, into the digital abyss.”

His counsel is to follow his lead:

“Get off social media.
Read good books and real journalism.
Find your friends.
And enjoy your life.”

For Dee Dee and me, not only the above, but evening baseball with our beloved Red Sox, even though they often break our hearts.

Point is, life is short. Make it fun!

RJ

The Risks of Not Reading

I needn’t labor on the inroads of our high tech age on our daily living habits, numerous studies elaborating on the atrophying of socialization and, dynamically, its impact on family life, parents and children exponentially independent of each other.

My purpose here is to focus on its intrusion upon our reading habits in this now predominately video age.

Consider the following:

According to The American Time Use Survey employing a representative sample of 26,000 Americans, reading for pleasure is now at its lowest point. Between 2004 and 2017, reading among men declined by 40%; among women, 29%.

Gallup tells us that the number of Americans who haven’t read a book in any given year tripled between 1978
and 2014.

For comparison, in 2017, Americans spent 17 minutes reading; 5.4 hours on their cell phones.

The menace of TV exceeds that of even social media. Some 60% of Americans eat their meals while watching TV. 47% of 9-year olds watch TV 2-5 hours daily (aft.org). On average, Americans TV binge 3-4 hours each day.

Collectively, a 2020 Nielson study reveals that the average American “spends a staggering 11 hours, 54 minutes each day connected to some form of media — TV, smartphones, radio, games” (abcnews.go.com). In short, many of us are media addicts.

You can reasonably assume this affects timeout for reading. It may also factor in our children’s continuing drop off in reading proficiency (henchingerreport.org), a vast subject in itself.

The reading of literary fare—poetry, short stories, novels, drama—has taken a special hit, even among those with college exposure, and across the board, regardless of race or ethnicity, exhibiting a ten year average decline of 14% between 1992 and 2002, according to the National Endowment for the Arts comprehensive study, Reading at Risk.

It comes at a cost. Literary reading in particular grows discernment, teaches values, fuels discussion as well as entertains. It liaisons us with the global community and cultivates cultural continuity. And, yes, it can keep us safe, crystallizing excess that imperils our well-being. All really good reads are fundamentally moral, underscoring the human contract to do the right thing by each other.

As for non-fiction, I haven’t gathered any stats, but it probably fares better. We’re not all literary aficionados and the choice of good non-fiction tomes crosses many genres, whether science, health, environment, psychology, philosophy, ad infinitum.

But judging from the The Times Best Seller Lists, most non-fiction reads will be of the self-help or business variety. You’re unlikely to find mind-bending items like Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, or Hoffler’s enduring classic, The True Believer.

As such, we impoverish ourselves if, when we do read, we do so indiscriminately. Our reasoning weakens. We see in fragments and not the whole. We become prey to parochialism and its hyperbolic distortions. Like our muscles, our brain prospers with exercise.

The bottomline is that so much of what we take for granted was once imagined. What better place to tap into its limitless underground caverns than a challenging read?

Through reading we meet ourselves, learn we’re not alone, find comfort, inspiration, and discernment. Not least, we encounter the coalescence of human experience, discover that each of us is its own rivulet flowing into a vast ocean of a greater Self.

Long term, the consequences of not reading become potentially devastating for both community life and democracy. Electronic resources foster instant gratification, replacing more concentrated effort. On the other hand, research shows discerning readers are more engaged in their communities. In sum, they help foster those values that promote the public’s interest and those amenities enhancing a functional democracy.

To not read is simply one more ingredient eroding family cohesion and breeding social isolation, not only pervasive, but advancing. It exchanges commitment for passivity.

As humans, we discover our individual identity through assertion. “To be or not to be? remains the existential question. Good literature inculcates not only its resolution, but its how.

Reading requires concentration, an intellectual skill that improves with exposure. To forfeit its dividends for Esau’s porridge of instant gratification with its fallout for the family and community is nearly too nightmarish for me to contemplate.

–rj