Mind Melt

Ripple, by Dadu Shin, 2024.

When I try to sit still, both physically and mentally, and let my mind filter through all it is has seen, heard, tasted, and experienced in recent and past times in hopes of producing a thought or an idea that I could germinate into a body of writing, I am often struck with the annoying realization that a dominant form of “rest” for my brain is actually choreographing. This is of course at its most unrelenting level when I am listening to music, which is both a blessing and a curse, because while I love aimlessly dancing in my own room or imagining choreography, I also try to use music to alchemically conjure up writing ideas or at least process events that I am going through in my life. When I am doing the latter, I inevitably end up choreographing something that often involves the person or people I am thinking about and how those relationships look in relation to the space that we take up as well as the swelling and silencing of the music. In truth, I was never a showstopping dancer and my abilities have only decreased since I attended classes far less often as I have gotten older but, because I started dancing before I even knew how to tie my own shoes, it’s a language and default mode that my brain and body fall back on quite often. 

When I finally started to interrogate this phenomenon, out of sheer annoyance of its inability to bring forth what I wanted, I began to wonder what this looked like in other people. What were other people’s mental modes that they tend to fall back on? What is the difference for background chatter of the brain between artists and non-artists? Should I give meditation an earnest go again? And thus, a solution — a topic to write about — was born from the issue or circumstance itself that I came to in the moment, rather than something that I came to through introspection and brute force; rejoice! A win for those psychologists and philosophers who are against too much self-thought and mental self-flagellation I suppose.

As an aside, or maybe this does correctly fit in here as being against too much self-importance, but I often think myself in circles over what is worthy of being written and posted, especially by me, but increasingly because of the junk-generating writing that Substack seems to be not only producing, but pushing. Substack, for those who don’t know, like my dad (hi Baba), is a platform for people to post their writing in the form of newsletters. It’s fine that Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok are filled with mental fluff — pictures of coffee, memes, Instagram face, kitten videos, cooking fails, other general garbage — but it really grinds my gears that this crap, yes, crap, is filling what was supposed to be a literary and word-based platform. I’m sorry, but if you’re not a writer or some other artist, or a friend of mine or someone I like, I tend not to care for your words about your latte that you had on a Tuesday evening after an average day at work and then went to pilates or the grocery store. Trust me, I care on Instagram, I will watch your overly gorgeous reel and be envious of the walkable city with public transport that you live in and I will like and maybe even save a post or two as aspirations of what I’d like my life to look like in the future, but it is so goddamn boring to read about perfect lives. If your public writing isn’t doing more than stating the obvious, then maybe it should be reserved for your journal, that private place where no one else is meant to read your jumble of undercooked thoughts. If I used my blog as a journal instead of my actual journals, one of which is a physical one and the other my notes app and google docs, I would probably jump off the nearest cliff from embarrassment, which unfortunately for me wouldn’t even result in death but rather some mangled bones, because the nearest thing to me that I could consider a cliff is a lovely, smelly Florida landfill.  

Someone might bring up Tumblr as a counterpoint to my argument, but I think that Tumblr is quite a different entity. Accounts there are overwhelmingly anonymous and that’s important, that anonymity is foundational to what gives its users the fearlessness to post things that are unattached to their identity, be it a silly idea, quip, musing, or observation. Also, importantly, going viral on Tumblr these days doesn’t have the same weight or psychological effect as going viral or gaining traction on a popping public platform, heck, most might even consider Tumblr to be long dead, and therefore the word “viral” doesn’t even really apply in the same way that it does to these other apps. If Tumblr is the app that is covered in cobwebs, then Substack is the shiny new toy that everyone wants a turn to play with and stick in their mouth and chew on. People’s surface level writing, photo dumps, and even meme-posting lives alongside amateurs and professionals in their field trying to create a space of their own for their research driven and insight laden articles. The people who are posting these lukewarm and bait-based posts are trying to catch a wave on the newest place one can cash in on the cultural zeitgeist.

“But Alara, some people are anonymous on Substack too!”

What if I told you that even if they are anonymous, they are still seeking the same high that comes with being socially validated?   

Nothing is keeping my interest in reading driving forward if there is no problem or larger thesis to support. I know people want to be the main character of their life, but I have no reason to care for this random information that is being posited as if you really are the main character of a book I am reading, or an artist whom I admire and care to learn about their mental and creative processes. If the latte doesn’t lead to some deeper comment about the state of coffee production methods and wrongdoings today, or the communal aspect of a cup of coffee that has been altered into an often solitary quest for energy in the workplace, or how the latte led to some grand realization about the past or an appreciation for the smaller things in life, I don’t want to see or read it! I may be a romantic but I am also a hater, which is the au courant way of saying I have discerning taste and I will stand behind it. 

People love pictures; they’re easy to take and easy to post. On Substack, I find it interesting that people try to gain attention to their account, their newsletter, through photos, memes, or even one-sentence long posts that are reminiscent of a tweet. People gain subscribers for what is supposedly a word-based platform through things that are mainly not newsletters. I’m crazy enough to think that your words should speak for themselves, that going about it this way feels a bit like cheating, but then again I am probably tragically old-fashioned in many ways. I want my separation of church and state in the same way that I want my separation of ironic memes and moodboards from thought-provoking newsletters. I expected Substack to be a haven for fellow word-lovers, but the people who run Substack, along with the users on it, realized that, like every other social media, images and videos are the fastest way to amass interest and keep people scrolling. I especially have a gripe with people who make posts like this on Substack but don’t even have a newsletter or have maybe one newsletter entry for every ten posts. It’s easier to fill up a feed or gain a following based on capturing what is part of your daily life or a short ironic post than it is to take the time to write about it critically, but it is deteriorating us rapidly. If we are not already the bone-shrunken and blubber bodies that Wall-E depicted, we are only a couple of years away from it. This pervasive desire and ability to market our lives without reflection is only shuttling us faster towards this reality. I’m angry and writing about this only because I feel like we deserve better and I want better for and from everyone. 

This is of course not a self-contained issue; it goes hand in hand with the shuttering of media outlets that at least produced reviewed, fact-checked, and edited work that passed over many eyes before being published and had some modicum of legitimacy to it, real or imagined. Now, thanks to both capitalism’s greedy money-grubbing and the advertising puppets behind it and the democratization of platforms on which your average person can post almost anything they want, we are left with an ocean of garbage with which to wade through, tirelessly searching for anything of quality, maybe even a diamond in the rough if we dare to dream so largely. 

I am no saint; I post my unreviewed writing on my own blog and I’ve never even taken a formal journalism course — a fact of which I am deeply self conscious and is extremely evident by my insistent use of the Oxford comma. When the list of my wrongdoings is read at my death, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that “hypocrite” will be on there. I have more questions than answers when writing and that leads me to believe I should turn more towards fiction than essays but, then again, literally what do I know? I’m not a great writer, I may never be, but I am earnestly trying (which is very embarrassing but nonetheless gratifying, by the way). If anything, I hope my writing feels like a lifeboat among the sea of garbage, if I may be so vain for just a moment. I will not go as far as saying that this is the lifeboat that will save you, there may even be a hole in it and water is rushing in as we speak, but I hope that it gives you a moment of respite and reflection in such an addled world.

Now how do I tie this back in with my opening about default modes of the brain… The default mode network (DMN) is just like it sounds: the parts of your brain that are active when you are not engaged in a specific task, but rather letting your mind wander, observing the environment, or daydreaming. Like many ideas in neuroscience, this concept comes with a lot of arguments about the specifics of its function, form, and even validity, but I think it’s an interesting idea to consider regardless and maybe even because of the mystery and criticism surrounding it. Neuroscience is a very nebulous science, it’s still an infant in relation to other fields that have been around and been able to be scientifically examined for centuries, but that’s part of the intrigue for me. Regarding my earlier question about the brains of artists and non-artists being different, that has been proven to be true, with the brains of artists being structurally different and more attuned to focusing on the whole visual field rather than individual objects. 

“Okay…but I still don’t care.”

Okay yes, what is my point? My point is that we need to stop turning our “brains off” with the slop of the internet and actually turn them off enough to allow our default network mode to awaken. In this state, we can begin to daydream, to reflect, to percolate on things that have happened to us lately and in the world. The internet is a lovely (and cursed) place to escape and numb ourselves — I am very aware as a frequent offender — but daring to actually reckon with ourselves is much needed. Not only for a more peaceful internal existence, but to create better art. When we stop trying to amass attention through half-baked ideas, irony laden memes, or vibey moodboards, we might actually begin to go deeper than the surface and create something truly novel and beautiful.

If you also know or come to realize a certain default mode of your brain, the way that mine is choreographing, please tell me, I would genuinely love to know! I clearly see the world through the filter of dance, but how do you see it? Can you imagine what it must be like to live life with a different filter? Whether you see this as a mere mental exercise or a way to think about the things you create differently, I sincerely hope it at least makes you slow down for a moment in a world that is always begging and coaxing us to speed up — faster damn it, faster!