Kamal Ghorui
Feed your brain fine things, the result will be resilience. Feed it junk, you’ll grow sillier by the minute
Dalgona coffee. Sourdough bread. Craftcore. Retro bingeing Malgudi Days and Mad Men. Rereading Ghalib and Premchand, Austen and Shakespeare. These were some of the ways we sought distraction during Covid. Today, there is a war going on in West Asia, which is not as scary as Covid, not yet. But life was already full of worries, so how is one to cope with this added stress? Escapism, hello, we are embracing you, once again. But are you a friend or frenemy?
That, actually, depends entirely on our own intentionality. Neil Postman’s 1985 volume, Amusing Ourselves to Death, remains the helpful classic on this subject. He describes people drowning in a sea of diversions, which make them sillier, by the minute. This is a peek-a-boo world, where content pops into view for a moment, then vanishes. We are not able to recollect the story, the tune, the message, anything at all, the next day, let alone the next year. And some of this content consumption does even worse things to us. It makes us more anxious, more tribal, less trusting of science, and less capable of sitting quietly by ourselves. Unthinking amusement does not add to our life, but reduces it. Just like we give a good diet to our body, our brain needs to be fed fine things. What happens when we feed it only junk? Brain rot.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin – we must cultivate our garden. This is Voltaire’s advice in an even earlier classic – Candide, first published in 1759. It suggests that the antidote when faced with evil, is making something, tending something, pursuing concrete, productive engagement. What’s really encouraging is that, where once neuroplasticity was thought the gift of childhood alone, research has now shown it continues throughout the human lifespan. Our brain is happy to learn, relearn, and absorb new ideas, if that’s our intention. When we do interesting work to improve our critical thinking, there is also a big unconscious bonus. In sleep, those neural connections grow strong magically. Do escapism right, and it makes you more resilient.
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https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm
https://ia801705.us.archive.org/4/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPostman-AmusingOurselvesToDeath.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006899325002021
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605141849.htm
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