Because the two-year anniversary of the pandemic shutdown approaches, and the chattering media lessons put together their “how far we’ve come” retrospectives, I’m studying Mel Brooks.
It’s a strategic transfer on my half, to learn the good director’s memoir on his superb profession as a comic and filmmaker, titled with a touch of mock narcissism “All About Me!”
Is it a give up to escapism amid all of the bulletins and unhealthy information about Ukraine, inflation, Putin, drought, Jan. 6, gasoline costs, and the baseball lockout? You possibly can characterize it that method, I suppose. However the predominant lesson that has stayed with me from the insanity of the previous two years is the diploma to which every of us has our personal particular person and infrequently extremely eccentric relationship with info, and disinformation. Studying anecdotes on the making of “Blazing Saddles” and “Younger Frankenstein” is my method to restore a little bit of stability in my very own psychological conception of the world I reside in.
Lengthy earlier than the pandemic, within the realm of media, we had all already grown accustomed to the world of bingeing and doomscrolling, indiscriminate and technology-enabled consumption of concepts and imagery, like a whale sucking in krill. However the pandemic turbocharged the always-on engines of reports and opinion, and created monumental funnel clouds of rage, concern, despair and nervousness. And our collective psychological well being has paid — continues to pay — a steep worth.
I used to be reminded of the paradox of how the glut of data has made us all blinkered and blinded final week by a story published by the BBC. The piece talked to individuals on the bottom in Ukraine below the barrage of the Russian military’s shelling of Ukrainian cities. These similar people had family again in Russia who didn’t consider their first-hand, eyewitness accounts of what was taking place in Ukraine as a result of they had been so deeply invested within the Russian authorities’s official narrative on the battle and who’s responsible for it.
Positive, it’s straightforward to tut-tut these benighted souls bamboozled by Vladimir Putin’s crude, Soviet-style propaganda. However haven’t all of us constructed our personal individualized worldviews in service to deeply held worth methods that will or might not conform solely with chilly, exhausting actuality (no matter that’s)?
Years in the past, earlier than the social media revolution, I clung to a particular metaphor when it got here to media consumption. Media, like meals, was to be regulated as a food regimen. Sports activities, tabloids, “Austin Powers” films, all that stuff was junk meals and sweet, an indulgence to be consumed solely moderately. Nationwide Geographic documentaries, 7,000-word items within the New Yorker, films with subtitles, that stuff was nourishment, the eat-your-veggies food regimen that led to being wholesome or, particular to media consumption, “knowledgeable.”
Within the age of curated social media feeds and bottomless Fb or Reddit scrolls, the food regimen analogy doesn’t maintain collectively anymore. Info lately is much less like meals and extra like medicine. I can design a media food regimen of solely top-quality credible sources of significant, fair-minded, non-partisan journalism. However does that essentially make me “wholesome”? Or does it simply create a cascade of extremely emotional ideas and pictures from which my restricted psychological make-up has little protection? Have you ever ever tried to shampoo your hair in a Yosemite waterfall?
Some day quickly — possibly that day is already right here — psychological well being professionals may have a time period for the uniquely potent risk that the countless information cycle contributes to melancholy, nervousness, or any variety of associated neurotic circumstances.
To get a way of how finest to take care of a useful and wholesome psychological state, I reached out to not a health care provider, however to a pupil of Zen Buddhism. JD Doyle is the Guiding Instructor, the group chief, at Insight Santa Cruz, a downtown group that leads individuals in meditation strategies primarily based on Buddhist ideas.
Doyle informed me that meditation is a crucial instrument for up to date residing, that People didn’t historically at all times have a important want for taking day out: “I say to individuals on a regular basis, ‘Did you really want to sit down down and meditate if you had been milking the cow each morning?’ That complete way of life we as soon as had methods to manage: stopping, pausing, recognizing our connection to the Earth, recognizing our connection to one another.”
It’s a disgrace that the time period “mindfulness” has been considerably diminished by overuse in advertising (a phenomenon generally referred to as “McMindfulness”). However the precept — understanding how your thoughts works to transcend “unhealthy” ideas and behaviors — remains to be very a lot related in how to deal with the calls for of social media and relentless information feeds.
So what does all this need to do with Mel Brooks? From the local weather disaster to the political disaster to the general public well being disaster, to the return of the Chilly Warfare, we’re all going through potential cataclysmic adjustments within the years forward, and recognizing that may do a quantity on one’s psychological well being.
The query of media consumption is not about engagement versus escapism. Like many individuals, I’ve usually discovered myself trapped in a late-night Reddit doomscroll from which I felt weirdly powerless to flee. The consequence after “informing” myself on the state of the world was that I used to be exhausted and fried, freaked out and outraged. If I’m going to contribute to options to those issues, that’s not a state from which I can function very nicely.
Mel Brooks and his charming and goofy tales about Hollywood take the temperature down. However it additionally accomplishes one thing extra vital: It evokes the tradition that I do know and love, my psychological and emotional homeland, and it jogs my memory that these connections are life-giving and are value defending.
No one in every of conscience lately can afford to drop out and switch off the information of the world. There’s merely an excessive amount of at stake. However the eat-your-veggies media food regimen doesn’t work anymore. Combine in some sweets. Discover your personal Mel Brooks. It’ll make the whole lot go down a bit simpler.
