“Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
There is way too little rock in the world today, and far too much roll.
No, I am not launching a music blog, although the direction of the music of my youth is sometimes troubling as well.
I am talking about rock. The gray and stony kind. You might have a few in your yard.
And roll, as in, going with the flow, without resistance.
In my first blog post, I made reference to our shrinking attention span that lasts but the few milliseconds it takes for a web page to load up, assuming you have a decent wifi connection. We live in a lightning fast world now. If we don’t get it soon, we leave before it gets there. We tire of the waiting, so quick to get bored. We jump from one dopamine-inducing rush to the next.
We are all addicts, wired into the world through our phones, our tablets, our laptops. And what happens as we fall deeper into addiction? In order to reach that same dizzy high, we must increase the dose. Find something more exciting. Or get it faster.
Our addiction to information and connection is a troubling road on which we have been travelling on at an accelerating pace now for twenty years or more.
But my issue, today at least, is not that we have our heads buried in our phones all the time. It is that this virtual pink bunny we’re all chasing has deprived us of our desire to stand against the tides of society.
We have ceased to be rocks. We only roll.
We stand for something—until it might cost us. We give up the gift of self-determination to avoid being viewed as different. We no longer care about anything except what social media tells us we should care about. In this time of mad hopping from one bit to the next, we have become jaded and apathetic. The only poles of true emotion we now feel are either the fleeting addictive excitement of discovering some random factoid or funny Youtube video or the appalling fear of social castration for not being “of the flock.”
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote the above quote nearly 1900 years ago. It was in his journal to himself, which was never intended to be published. He didn’t write that as an admonishment to the craven about him, seeking his approval and support. He wrote it for himself. He recognized that he, too, was subject to the relentless tides of public opinion. That if he did not find something to stand for, he would simply be strewn about with the waves. He sought to be a headland.
A headland is, perhaps, the most powerful form of natural rock in the world. Constantly besieged by the pounding of powerful surf and waves, this rock jutting out into the sea nonetheless remains obstinate and unmoving. Instead of falling before the waves, or being pushed about, it calms the waters around it. The waves break on its surface, and fall away.
We don’t have enough of these in our virtual world now. Social media has placed us in the immediate vicinity of every other person on the planet, so close that we dare not disagree with them.
The why of my blog is this: I am looking for rocks. I am looking for headlands.
Apply inside.