Technology Stress

I wrote this for a stress article - since TMS is a stress disorder I thought it might be of interest


Consider This

With the advent of electronic and on line media what better way for a large percentage of the population to express or create a “False Self”


You are anonymous and can be anything you want – the problem is if you present this false self often enough the brain will start to think it is true and act accordingly. Then you have the cognitive dissonance split.

What a wonderful playground for people with wounded selves – now you can take on any identity, persona and look you want. You can even put your face on another body.


I know young people are really involved in technology and many have never known a time when reality could not be altered with a keystroke.
This lack of external consistency is extremely damaging to the human psyche – it is like living in a world where the ground is not solid and everything is situational. Simply you can not trust anything – not even your eyes and ears.


If you ever watch an animal that has found a change in their environment you see the stress involved in change. Watch a cat circle and tap something new on the floor. Unlike a cat humans have a huge cortex and a drive for novel exploration. However we have the same basic limbic system that elicits a stress response to the lack of external consistency.


In a nutshell our technology is creating generations of people that have no roots in reality. A hundred years ago nothing much changed and you probably had the same friends and neighbors all your life. If you saw it, it was real....no deception, no internal chaos over the what is true.


Alvin Toffler was right back in 1970– we are becoming products of future shock!!

 

Try as they will to create alternative personae on Facebook and other social media networking sites, I still notice that a core personality has a way of shining through the cyber rhetoric people like to play around with. Creating and manipulating a social image is as old as acting and performing. It's just with the advent of social media that it's become available to the proverbial Every Man. There was a recent article in the Atlantic under the intriguing title, "Is Facebook making us lonelier?" But the minute you have a social profile in any scene, you're always worried about maintaining your "image", wondering whether people like the real you or the self created by the media (often with your collaboration). I know a model in Colorado who has over a hundred pictures of her lovely face on her FB site, each one showcasing one of her many moods. That's what she does: she's a model who projects different images. Of course, her drinking and child custody disputes with her ex still keep surfacing in the midst of all these tantalizing seductive images. No matter how skillfully you construct your persona, the truth seems to keep coming out no matter how much you work at wall-papering it over. Remember that Plato in the 10th book of the Republic banished artists from his ideal state because they created images that were three-times removed from reality. Since then many apologists have come up with arguments to let the artists back into society, but literalists of the imagination have never liked artists and actors who play around with reality and alternative definitions of the self. Hence, Stalinist Soviet Realism and National Socialist Art a la Dr Goebbels.

 

Last summer, I was speaking with a college student who said that she had dropped Facebook. When I asked her why, she responded that it was "way too stressful" to keep. I inquired about what stressed her and she said that there was too much competition to be "happy" and that the more her friends would post about "their happy life events" the more down she felt about her own life. Further, she said that needing to show that she had as many friends as others was overwhelming. Good for her that she shut it down. She released herself from the ego that had to compete and she felt relief.

I suppose in the near future there will be Technology Anonymous groups - the next addiction.

So for this young woman, yes, Facebook made her lonelier and full of anxiety to keep up with her friends.

 

I decided I didn't need a cell phone or an iPod or any of those handheld devices that keep so many peopled tuned in to everyone else and to the universe.
Maybe it was because I worked nearly 10 years as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and during my years on the city desk I had to take phone calls from reporters on the street who called in with more "bad news" -- crime, violence, etc. After I left that stressful occupation I became a magazine editor and then a freelance writer of magazine articles and books. I still used the telephone, but I no longer had anxiety over what the next call would be.

I like some technology... the computer and email when it works. When it doesn't I go into a Donald Duck rage.

Our block was without power for four days and three nights a few years ago and I didn't miss tv, the computer, or telephone at all.
I read a book, listened to soothing music on my battery-operated Sony Walkman, and walked my dog more.
I can hardly wait for the next power outage. So many people today want to be plugged in all the time. I love being unplugged.
It gives my mind and spirit a rest.

 

We're all going to turn into cyber deniers and Luddite anti-technocrats! Where's my fuzzy blanket?

 

I think I might actually argue the opposite.
Sometimes the on-line person is the most honest, especially if you are a t-type personality.
Very few people who know me in life, know the real me. They are getting half of me: the half that is cheerful and patient and smiling.
I do not have a facebook account, but I am involved in a few internet groups.
On the internet, where I have the relative anonymity of only using part of my name, I can be more open with me feelings.

 

"We should only look in mirrors, because mirrors do but show us masks"

- Oscar Wilde

 

Good thoughts everyone, on a good TMS subject.
My fuzzy blanket for technology stress is to take a walk with my dog or just play with her.
Her eyes always tell me she gives me unconditional love.

 

I also do some yoga exercise, although not quite like this one.

 

I got a phone call today from someone at an electric energy company
and he asked so many questions that I answered days ago that I got frustrated
and yelled at him. This went on for a while and I finally hung up on him.

Later I learned that the call was a prerecorded call, so I was yelling at someone
who wasn't even there. Afterward I laughed and that helped relieve my stress.

But it's an example of technology today that bombards us all the time.

My new routine will be to use caller ID or if the phone rings and there is a delay
before I hear a voice, it's probably a prerecorded phone call, so I will hang up.

Also, I will try not to answer the phone or read my email after 6 pm.
I can wait until the next morning for bad news.

Has technology got you stressed? How? What are you doing about it?