For a very long time now the common people have suffered an eccentric series of ever-more intrustive and subtle violations that emerge from our ‘modern’ situation in our lives and cultures.

One could select any specific beginning point for this invasion; the invention of the telegraph, radios, televisions, computers, the internet, smart phones, and so on.

As the bizarre projects of modernity proceeded, we found our lives and minds (not to mention relationships) ‘invaded’ in the sense that the boundaries that comprised our personal and family lives, even our mental interiority, were being continuously infringed by processes and responsibilities that shrank or repurposed our lives and their ‘compartments’.

These processes, largely technological, ceaselessly invented new domains of tasks, interruptions, noise, toxicity, distonic temporalities, notifications, and so on.

These assaults on our personal lives and minds t ‘keep adding new layers’ of interruption, obligation (real and imagined), distraction, and distonic signals, often from machines. What was once reasonably private and or voluntary, increasingly became more complexly vulnerable to aspects of social, work, and relational signals that obliterated the pace and private sense of our lives.

All that trespasses on time and our experience of it disorients and desynchronizes not merely our lives… our relationships… our bodies… their metabolism, rhythms and health.

Many of these intrusions were, it should be noted, the primary result of three factors: the motivations of advertising, the desire to sell us products (especially entertainment), and the onset of various technologies allowing instantaneous, round-the-clock availability of their recipient-victims.

But an inversion has occurred, resulting in a new wave of novel threats to our lives and minds. Because the compartmentalization that previously represented the boundary between our homes and bodies… and everything exterior to them… has been violated by the onset of the pandemic.

We didn’t used to have to think of everything we touched when outside; our keys, pockets, wallets, money, phones, bags, and so on. Now, however, all of this has changed in a way that places strict boundaries on activities that occur ‘outside’ and, rationally, we are expected or expect ourselves to be able to manage all of this, along with the other stresses and threats emergent from the pandemic.

These tasks are actually impossible, and while I agree with the rational imperative to be careful, and to care for others (i.e. mask wearing), it is at the same time obvious to me that this represents an entirely new development in the bizarre situations we face in cultures totally unprepared for »any of these developments and their repercussions in our bodies, minds and relationships.

The entire dimension of compartmentalization has changed in ways that are catastrophic to us. Imagine if your organs bled into one another, failing to maintain their distinctness, or if poison mixed with packaging and food, or if noise was introduced to text… we face a similar situation with our present circumstances, we can no longer tell signal from noise, and new forms of noise are continually invented and inserted into our common experience. Things that once alerted us to possible threats… have become threats themselves.

It’s extremely difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which this becomes survivable, and is so dangerous that it will rapidly overwhelm the senses we might otherwise use to detect and respond to it.

Yet this is the situation we find ourselves in today. The anchors from which meaning, hope, understanding, and time were previously determined… have been continuously violated, destroyed, or replaced by new technologies and threats (many of which masquerade as ‘conveniences’).

We are no longer »capable of responding, and have been thrown into a state of constant, ever-more-disorganized reactivity and stress-inducing stimuli. To say that this is an opportunity for being taken advantage of us a terrible understatement… this »is … being taken advantage of, in ways we are ill-equipped to understand, let alone cope with effectively.

( While I was writing this I received a phone call from a machine (with a fake phone number) associated with some corporation attempting to sell me health insurance. )