People want substance these days.
Hell, I want substance these days.
An astrologer I listen to used the term the other day that struck me.
She said “in the spiritual entertainment business …”
There it is.
The Spiritual Entertainment Business.
Calling it exactly how it is.
That’s exactly what the majority of our world has become.
Entertainment.
Content without substance.
Informational, spiritual, and self-help junk food.
We are literally spoon fed crack cocaine through our apps, our phones.
We know our attention and our mental health is suffering.
We know our relationships are suffering.
So we look to help … where?
On social media.
That was the original intended purpose, wasn’t it?
Connection?
We are literally in an abuse cognitive dissonance relationship with our phones and with the junk food information systems we’ve created, why?
Because we are inherently wired for connection.
And connection requires some things of us that are inherently hard.
And the technological web we’ve spun has us wanting to believe that we can hack the hard parts and get the same result.
Sadly, you can’t hack depth.
You can’t hack wisdom, compassion, or social skills.
You can’t hack understanding humanity.
You can’t hack birth or death.
You literally can’t hack anything that is of any significance or importance to the human life.
There are some things that, if you want them, you are going to have to get uncomfortable.
We’ve gotten less good at uncomfortable.
Especially in the first world.
In a world where you don’t even need to “hunt” your food in the grocery store, we’ve not only become shitty hunters, but other essential skills – like building real connections with other humans – have atrophied, and we are paying the consequences.
Dearly.
This way of living has conditioned us in a way that has also given us a kind of cultural amnesia of what it means to have depth in our lives.
We are so starved of real nourishment – in our relationships, our teachers, the depth of information and knowledge we interface with – that our hunger becomes desperation.
Our compulsion to shop, to take course after course, read book after book, endlessly scroll inspo (that has no real depth nor substance behind it) comes from somewhere.
We are beyond hungry.
We are starving.
We are starving for real substance in every layer and aspect of our lives.
Even our literal food is devoid of the nutrients, minerals, and nutrition it once contained 100 years ago.
Now I’m not suggesting we abandon modern life in order to live off the land in tribes once again.
But what I am suggesting is we need to not just call out the elephant in the room, but actually begin – both individually and as a collective – to take small steps towards regaining nourishment in our lives.
On a personal level, this has been showing up as a deep urge to get offline more and intentionally connect to people who are important to me – in person.
Pre-pandemic, I had been building an online healing business and so in the beginning of the pandemic, as our collective familiarity with the online space grew, so did my ease of the day to day tasks I had been working with years before.
Post-pandemic, I too felt the collective starvation of real human connection. Online experiences, though they can be deep and meaningful, are not a substitute for the experience of human to human connection. I craved the rootedness of community with depth. I craved the “before” of life where the price of friendship was spending meaningful time together, not the commodification that the word “community” had become.
Commodification.
That’s another thing.
I write that word with a hint of bitterness and resentfment for just how far we’ve gone.
We live in a day and age where literally nothing is sacred.
Where people are literally paying for an entrance fee for friendship and community.
Remember when it was normal to feed your friend’s cat for a week when she was gone on vacation?
Remember when you just gave someone a ride somewhere because you were going in that direction?
Remember a time when there was no entrance fee to normal day to day social interaction and connection?
You even have to pay for dating apps and websites these days (if you want to find a quality connection that is)!
Do you remember the last time you chatted with the person in the grocery store line up?
Do you even remember the last time you were even in a grocery store line up?
Without even realizing it, we’ve traded convenience for connection.
Little by little.
I’m not saying that you were going to meet your soul mate or bestie at the grocery store (though that is in the realm of possibility).
My point is that all of these small interactions and interfaces have an important function and roll that build the foundations of a greater meaning in our lives – the greater connections, the depth we are looking for, are made up of the small things.
The small things are ever so apparent in our closest relationships.
You know this.
I know this.
It’s never the big gesture that disappoints you and makes your heart sink in your most intimate realtionships.
It’s the small things.
You didn’t text me “good morning”.
You didn’t have time to kiss me goodbye before work – again.
A particular word said.
A nonchalant phrase.
These are the places and spaces that either create and build our relationships and nourish our biological need for connection, or separate us.
It is in these spaces where we are fed and deeply nourished, or are starved of the essential substance of life.
In the very same way we are starved for connection, the substance of relationships, we are starved for wisdom, the substance behind “information”.
What separates true knowledge – a mixture of lived and practiced experience over time, mentorship from elders, devotion to our craft – from the junk food information overload we are sold is disconcerting.
I think I will leave a deep dive into this thread for a future post, but for now I just want to make the link between the two as they are not separate and are rooted in the same fundamental cognitive dissonance and avoidance of discomfort.
The depth and substance of wisdom – to be continued.
For now I will leave you with this inquiry.
How comfortable are you with being uncomfortable?
What is your tolerance for sitting in the space of uncertainty?
I’ve talked about sitting in the liminal space and transitions in a very real way in previous posts.
How do you handle not knowing?
The practice of being with yourself in discomfort and avoidance of really feeling this state is completely natural and human, and yet, the more we can cultivate our tolerance and expand this space, we make room for the very substance we are starving for.
With love,
Jenn