#73 - A Defense Against Attention Drugs
Phantom Scrolling; Choose Your Own Adventure (Again); What is HMF?; Time Machine
Hello, my friends,
It’s been a bit of a weird week. Sophie started preschool on Monday and promptly felt under the weather (new germs and all) so I stayed home with her on Wednesday and Thursday. Unusually, she also hasn’t been sleeping well so pardon me if this week’s issue has more typos than usual and/or just stops making sense, I’m writing it after a few rough nights. Sometimes parenting is fun and sometimes you wonder whether your child is feeling ill because of new germs or because of stress from a transition. Despite the ambiguity, kids are very adaptable so I know that Sophie will be just fine soon enough.
Speaking of aches, I’ve been experiencing lower back and hip pain since I started running a few months ago. I have been stretching but it hasn’t helped so I took to YouTube to try to understand how the various muscles around there fit together and identify some exercises to work out the area/add stability/engage the different muscles appropriately. I found a manageable workout and have been doing it since the beginning of the week. After a few days I realized that my back pain was worse — it was really bad! What’s going on, I thought. Then it came to me: I’m sore! I’ve been engaging my glutes and lower back specifically and my body is telling me that it’s working. The shift in mindset from “I’m in pain” to “it’s part of the solution” makes a big difference. Notably, my hips feel better. I’m going to keep on going with this workout, though I’m planning to add an exercise focusing on the hamstring as well.
In other news that may not be super-interesting unless you’re into the specific stuff I’m talking about (fitness, etc.), the Nagoya sumo tournament is starting on Sunday. This tournament takes place during a very hot time in Japan and the arena apparently doesn’t have air conditioning. I can empathize with the wrestlers, it was 100°F where we live the other day!
Phantom Scrolling
Every so often, I make up words for online phenomena I notice (see: “algorithmic dissonance” in issue #65 and “slowcial media” in issue #12) and today I’d like to introduce you to “phantom scrolling.” I noticed it recently after having been mostly off of Facebook for a few weeks. I wake up in the morning, grab my phone, check my email, and then, when I would usually check Facebook…Nothing. Except that it’s not nothing, my brain is, on it’s own accord, attempting to simulate the neurotransmitter occurrences that come from checking social media. It’s like the feeling amputees get where their brain has not become accustomed to being sans limb, so it repeats the signals of its existence. Here, the limb is the empty time where I’m not doom-scrolling instead of getting out of bed.
As this concept occurred to me, I wondered what made it useful or important. To me, the existence of phantom scrolling speaks to the habitual pathways social media digs into our brains mostly without us even noticing. Was there ever really a reason for me to check Facebook second thing in the morning? Of course not. Immediacy doesn’t often provide any tangible benefit for my personal or professional lives but, maybe through some evolutionary need, I overvalued the mostly irrelevant and useless information in Facebook feed.
I doubt I’m going to be going back to being a frequent Facebook user anytime soon and part of what is going to keep it that way (similar to the way reminding myself of “The Desire”/Taṇhā keeps me from caffeine) is reminding myself of how easily the brain fools itself into believing in a thing that is not there.
Creating mental defenses against attention drugs is especially important with the rise of uber-addictive micro-videos in services like TikTok (which I am very deliberately avoiding) and features on other platforms like Reels/Shorts/Stories/etc (which I have not done as well at scrolling past). The easiest way to fight addiction to attention drugs is to forbid the brain from digging the neural pathways in the first place by avoiding the stimulus, but short of that, create reasons, metaphors, hypnotic suggestions, that fill in the pathways. There might be phantom scrolling or swiping at first, but slowly it will fade.
Choose Your Own Adventure (Again)
I recently finished reading the two-volume manga, A Distant Neighborhood by Jiro Taniguchi, about a 48-year-old salaryman, Nakahara, who through some unexplained magic (read: A hangover, maybe?) goes back in time to his 14th year — the year his father left the family. An adult mind in a teen body sounds like a slapstick comedy film, but this graphic novel isn’t that at all. Instead it is a serious and poignant meditation on the tension between the power of our choices and the inevitability of fate.
Nakahara goes through several stages during his time in the past. At first he’s bewildered and confused, attempting to remember his life of three decades ago while making sense of the situation. Then he becomes comfortable in his shoes, armed with more confidence and knowledge, he surprises everyone by excelling in his classes, dating the prettiest girl in the class, and expertly riding a motorcycle. Finally, he begins to seek answers to the major unknowns that have plagued him as he aged, family secrets that, once uncovered, add a new dimension to his view of the past and his present life.
In a sense, A Distant Neighborhood is psychotherapy as manga. Nakahara revisits his past and, through his eyes of experience, questions, and exploration re-frames the events of his life, most notably his father’s sudden and unexplained disappearance — the source of distinct sorrow around which the book rotates. The scene in which the family, especially young Hiroshi and his little sister, Kyōko, stay up late eagerly awaiting their father’s return from his business trip is one of the several from the book that will stay with me.
Despite the fanciful conceit, Taniguchi crafted a work that was realistic enough to urge me to consider my actions were I in a similar situation. What would I do differently as a teenager and what would I keep unchanged? Equally as important, how far would my choices really go in making a difference in the outcome of pivotal moments?
Needless to say, I ordered all of the other books by Mr. Taniguchi that the library had. If they are as remarkable as A Distant Neighborhood, I am in for a treat.
Perhaps my father…
…had always thought of going to somewhere else, somewhere far away from here.
Did he endure fifteen years of staying in this town just for the sake of his family?
I still couldn’t understand it.
Why did my father decide to disappear? Why would he just abandon his whole life here?
To search for something in some distant neighborhood far away from here?
What kind of desires burned in his heart to make him want to do this?
What is HMF?
I may have written about this before, but it comes to mind at regular intervals: Despite everything I’ve read about marketing, I am not very good at applying these learnings to myself and this newsletter. The crux of it is, I find it very difficult to describe exactly what I’m doing here into a single sentence or box it into a genre. I write about parenting, books, social media, sumo, and various other topics. Last week, I wrote a memoir-ish essay about community college! The main through-line is that I’m the author of the whole thing. It’s a weekly letter from Oleg to his friends. But that’s not very descriptive, is it? It sort-of defeats the purpose of the whole enterprise if you have to read it to know what it is.
Likewise, the qualities of the newsletter are inconsistent. It’s mostly casual, but not always. Sometimes, it’s funny or, at least, worthy of a very brief grin. There’s art that also runs the gamut from representational pieces to full-on abstract, to weird AI-generated nightmares. And then, I also post fiction and (rarely) poetry. Essentially, this is most akin to a personal blog. I shouldn’t be on Substack, I should be on LiveJournal.
Anyway, if you have a moment, can you do me a solid by describing this newsletter in either three individual words, or one full sentence in the comments? I crave definition!
Time Machine
Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #20):
An Attitude of Gratitude: Following a Positive Philosophy Dictum, I wrote down three things I was thankful for.
How Ideas Spread: How complex ideas are distilled into the cultural mileau and sometimes surface as bumper stickers.
I’m Sorry, Little Spider: An apology for accidentally killing a tiny spider that was in the herbs I used for tea.
naming things isn't easy. as a fellow blogger, I've read much about how people are sooner to seek out sites where they can say to themselves, "ok, this is the blog where I learn about xyz." Unfortunately, focusing on only one singe thing is too dull & difficult for me. my Happiness Between Tails was meant to encompass my 'tales' life as a writer, & 'tails' life with 2 dogs -- & now I only have one haha. as a writer, I'm not thrilled with the time suck of social media. but I need it for 2 things: 1. as I'm querying literary agents, they prefer people with followings. 2. if I end up self-publishing, I'll also need to know people who might like my books. for both those reasons, I seek to meet individuals within literary fiction loving circles
3 words? Fathering, books, and art?
1. consider the possibility that not defining what you're doing is better than succumbing to the relentless pressure to "brand" things. Not everything needs to be summed up in three words -- speaking for myself at least, most of what I love most in life I love because it falls into the liminal of not this nor quite that, that "you just have to read/listen/see/experience" it to understand. I would put HMF into that category for sure.
2. I need more clarity on what phantom scrolling is. I think I sort of get it, but more please.
3. relative to your reframing your muscle aches from a problem to a part of the process, I had a similar revelation relative to my creative work. Those times when I sit and stare at the screen (or do things like comment on a friend's substack when I'm meant to be writing my own...) are not in fact a diversion, but part of the creative process, as are the times when it all seems to fall apart. Once I figured out that both avoidance and the falling part are just stages in the game, things got a whole lot better. Not that those aches and pains are fun, but they're native plants in the garden.
4. Your descripton of the manga novel remind me of one of my favourite ever TV series -- the Canadian series "Being Erica," which deals with the same premise of whether going back to fix the regrets of your past would actually make life better or whether it would just create a new set of problems. Available on most streaming platforms, highly recommend, with the usual caveat that the first few episodes of the first season are about finding their footing and it takes a bit to settle into the more mature series that it becomes in later seasons.