While packing for a trip, we may forget
medicines or first aid, but never the camera. And with the camera comes a certain
hunger, not for the adventure itself, but for
something to carry back, to flaunt, to return
to later.
The camera button seduces us into believing that capturing the moment is the same as
living it.
I have watched myself click the camera
at a laughing child, at a steaming meal, and
even at a sky doing something unrepeatable.
In each case, pressing the button was the end
of the experience, not the preservation of it.
We call them memories. But they are, more accurately,
nostalgic tchotchkes. Proof that we were present, collected at the precise moment we stopped being so.
Even with all the comforts around us, there are days
when life feels strangely half-lived. Even the best of
us drift now and then, moving through life as if we are
watching it from a little distance.
Vishwamithra’s Penance
Our mythology has its own version of this. Sage
Vishwamitra traded his kingdom for a life of fierce,
unrelenting tapas. He was getting dangerously close
to becoming a Raja Rishi, a sage-king
of such power that even the gods grew
nervous. So Indra intervened, not with
force, but with something far more
effective. He sent the celestial being
Menaka. She arrived quietly, as the best
diversions always do, and what followed was not a seduction so much as
a substitution. A constructed world,
warm and convincing, replaced the real
one. Years dissolved as Vishwamitra
drifted into the charm of Menaka.
When he finally stirred, he understood something that no tapas had yet
taught him: the most sophisticated captivity is the kind you choose willingly,
because it feels like living. The simulation economy is, in this sense, ancient.
Only the algorithms are new.
Living Others’ Lives
Which brings me to another button I know
rather well, the scroll, or its ancestor, the
channel button. There is a peculiar feeling
that comes with switching through channels on the television: entering lives, moving
through stories, attending weddings and
funerals of people who do not exist.
We spend more time with fictional characters than with the real people next door.
Do you remember the hours spent watching people debate how the Avengers might
defeat Thanos and undo the snap? It is not
the fantasy that surprises me. It is the collective time that disappears into it.
Cal Newport, writing about our current attention
economy, observed that deep, focused work is becoming rarer just when it has become more valuable.
Vishwamitra’s tapas was, in that sense, the original
deep work. And Indra knew exactly which button to
press to interrupt it. Each of us carries, somewhere, a
version of that unfinished tapas, a craft slowly being
built, a thought slowly taking shape, a life slowly being
lived on its own terms. The scroll does not take it from
us loudly. It simply makes the Raja Rishi inside us a
little harder to reach, one episode at a time.
Hitting Pause
Which is why I have lately begun to think
that the most important button may not
be the one that promises more — more
memories, more stories, more purchases
— but the one that interrupts them.
The pause button has none of the
glamour of the others. It does not capture,
extend, or transport. It merely returns
you to yourself. To the room you are in.
To the work waiting on the table. To the
life, unfinished and unspectacular, that
does not ask to be watched before it can
be lived. Perhaps that is why it is the button we press least. There is no thrill in it,
only the quiet chance to notice what has
been passing by while the algorithms, as
always, did their work.