Thinking about Cheese, Distractions, and the Avoidance of Self-Consciousness
This is a more personal and confessional piece of writing compared to what I have released thus far. I intend to produce a great deal more of content in this style, as I take it to be the very content of ‘Life’ that this blog is dedicated to ‘Thinking Through.’
I was walking home today (As I’m writing this, though it’ll be published at 9am!) from work. My walk is about 25 minutes — I live in a city: there are things to see, stores to hop into; at worst, it is a nice time to have some silence and think.
But I do none of those things. On most days, as I walk home, I make phone calls. I have a few contacts I cycle through. When one person doesn’t pick up, I call the next; if they don’t pick up either, I keep going down the list.
I also watch a lot of YouTube videos, often at night. The experience is the same: I scroll down the list, sit through the video, and, when its done, move on to the next.
I was journaling about these behaviors, and, initially, thought them to be annoying but explicable. I figured that I was just another victim of our generation’s intolerance towards silence. The video watching, the phone calls, are all ways of staving off the boredom or loneliness that might find me walking home or at night. They are activities, things I can focus on instead of myself. Presumably, then, when I do these things, I hide from something about myself; something that would ‘turn up’ in the process of reflection.
Or, more pointedly: I deduced that I was hiding, throwing myself into these various activities in order to avoid looking into the mirror because something was there.
Sometimes, though, nobody picks up. Sometimes I can’t find a video to watch. And, when that happens, my mind wanders. Even in silence we cower at the thought of reflection. I thought about what cheese I would put on my sandwich for dinner.
But, wait a moment. There’s something interesting going on here. At first, my thought was that these various activities — phone calls or watching videos — were ways to avoid silence, and the mind wandering that ensued. They were activities to keep my mind occupied. And, I turned to them, I figured, because I unconsciously knew that if the curtain fell, if I stopped my activities, then I would be faced with something scary.
When my mind was free to go in any direction it liked, unsaddled by the topics of a phone call or the youtube video, I would have to deal with something. It was that ‘dealing’ I figured I was avoiding.
Yet, as I just said, my mind wandered and nothing happened. I had nothing to do: no videos to watch, no people to call. With no activities to hide in, instead of facing my fears, I laid on the floor and thought about cheese.
My mind wandered in boredom: the very thing I thought I had been avoiding the entire time. It was not at all scary. I had Swiss in the fridge, nothing to worry about. Certainly my cheese anxiety couldn’t have been the thing I was spending so much energy making phone calls or watching videos to avoid.
But now things have become confusing. I had assumed that the videos and the phone calls were modes of resistance: ways to keep myself from getting bored (putting aside the philosophical weirdness of that language). Yet, I became bored and found nothing to resist. So they were not ways of resisting boredom. What was I resisting, then? What did the Phone calls, YouTube videos, and now cheese thoughts save me from?
Here’s one answer: reflection. Phone calls, video watching, and cheese thoughts are all ways of thinking about the world. By making small talk, watching a video, and thinking about cheese, I avoid thinking about myself, about my own behavior. By taking things in the world as objects of investigation, I avoid looking inwards. Okay, does that work?
Nope. At least, if this is true, then these are awfully bad modes of resistance. I am thinking and reflecting, after all, right now. About them!
What is notable is that even though these activities do not forestall reflection permanently, they merely limit it. When I’m watching a YouTube video, or on a phone call, I don’t stop, in the moment, and think about what I’m doing. It is for the time being that I cease to be self-conscious.
Of course, reflection is still possible. I don’t mean to deny this. But perhaps there is still something pernicious about engaging in activities in such a way that one is not able to reflect, in the whirl of action, on what one is doing.
This is the beginning of a more plausible answer. Maybe we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. The video-watching, phone-calling, or cheese-mind-wandering are not strategies, this gives them too much credit. They are much less mature than that.
It is not that my unconscious has hatched a plan to keep me from reflecting on what I am doing in the moment, from becoming immediately self conscious. For one, no good villain would distract his victims by having them think about cheese. It sounds funny but I’m completely serious. Like I said earlier, if these are ways to prevent me from becoming self-conscious, they are not very effective.
So let’s drop the language of ‘prevention.’ These aren’t ways a part of me acts to keep me from becoming self-conscious; they’re failures of self-consciousness. I keep on going: watching the video, calling the next person, thinking about cheese (Swiss? Provolone? Shit, I’m doing it again) exactly because I am not self-conscious of what I am doing. My mind has wandered away.
So. The very thing we thought I was avoiding, mind-wandering, is the problem. These activities are not ways of hiding from it, they are ways of doing it, ways I have failed to be self-conscious.