Gardening with brains
Situations of enforced intimacy (plane rides, emergencies, guy wanking on the subway) can provide the best or most disturbing public experiences. The disturbing ones are rare; so are the best ones. Most are neutral.
I’ve been thinking about bein’ alone lately; about whether it’s a self-deluding thing to spend so much time alone working or an economical one. Mostly, I wonder how the lack of public interactions might affect a person. The neutral experiences don’t matter, but the good and bad ones do, very much, by eliciting (forcing!) renewals of character.
Which brings me to the internet. The internet is tricky. It provides endless neutral social (debatably public) experiences, but nothing else. All good interactions are diminished and all bad ones muffled by having occurred online. But to someone who is usually alone, going online feels distinctly social.
I wonder if the internet, when relied upon for social stuff, ends up being malnourishing— not unnourishing, exactly (it won’t cause hunger), but the wrong kind of sustenance.
No conclusions yet.
