Enough Feeds!

When I was in high school, one of the books some of the kids were assigned to read was “Feed,” a young adult novel about some dystopia (I was in the other reading group, so I never read it).

However, you could tell from the title (and the cover) that it was a critique of social media. And from what I can see on Wikipedia, that’s a big part of it.

When you stop to think about it, “feed” used as a noun implies that its recipient is either some kind of captive animal, or else bedridden (as in ‘drip-feed’).

And who’s to say that it’s a noun, and not an imperative?

Anyone who has spent hours mindlessly scrolling social media can certainly attest that it can often feel that way. “Feed!”

Yet:

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?

No! Life ought to be active.

Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that any activity will suffice.

Too many people are geniuses at spinning their wheels.

Often, a superficial, empty activity conceals deep passivity. Without a connection to some greater purpose, it doesn’t seem right to call this activity at all.

Conversely, an apparent passivity can conceal profound activity. “Still waters run deep”—and conscious inaction, provided that it is freely chosen in order to achieve some worthwhile goal, is just as much of a choice as external activity.

So! More and more lately, I can’t look at any feed without getting a queasy feeling. Basically, I’m fed up.

You know what else gets fed?

Cattle and infants—and this is fine for what they are, but when a grown adult does it, they’re wasting their life.

An active person—an adult—acts in order to get out of reality what he or she wants from it.

So: stop being fed, and eat.

Of course, I know there’s some irony in me posting this here. Substack is social media too, after all. But hopefully you’re reading this because you chose to follow me, not because it was served up to you while you were mindlessly scrolling.

Also! I made a Tampermonkey script to block the main feed on substack.com.

It’s not that I don’t like you all—and I hope that the feeling is mutual—it’s just that, as I said, I find the experience of being fed to be intensely degrading.

What’s attention? In a more rarefied form, it’s prayer—but more generally, it’s life force, spiritual energy.

Why give that away?

I want to stay here because I like the experience of communicating with people, but on our own terms, as we want it—the associations that we choose, not whatever the algorithm shuttles our way.

Download it here.