Creation and Consumption

Planted 02020-02-26

Distinguish that from which is artificial, forced, or remote from actual experience.

Take notice of how quick we are to grow weary from idleness. Test yourself to be at rest in nature, distinguishing that from which is artificial, forced, or remote from actual experience. Remove any screens and lights from view and sit idly. Let time pass, take note of your diffuse thoughts. Realize the present holds measureless depth when no longer confined by the distracted digital representations.

Around the age of six, I would fasten an earnest and prolonged gaze on the overhead of a room. What would it be like to run across the uneven surfaces, opposite to the rule of being that holds so certain and constant? A familiar space transformed into the land of a mischievous spirit. This imaginary sight gradually ceased to appear as projected images from flat surfaces gained rule.

Enough of that prose. No screens to monitor for updates bring a forgotten feeling of calm and relief. This new cycle of consumption and creation has advanced the gradual failure of the health, strength, and soundness of those powerless to employ it.

We can model consumption and creation as input and output.

Consumption: Consuming by use, waste, etc.
Creation: Creating or causing to exist.

becomes

Input: Feed data into a machine.
Output: Data produced by a machine.

The intervening body between the two, that’s you. Specifically, it’s your judgments, reasoning, and perspective. Scale this up and your outputs now have the opportunity to enter someone else’s inputs — granted you enter their circle of awareness. Your outputs will only have an effect by passing through the filter of the mind — it’s judgments, reasoning, and perspective. It may not lead to another output but it can change the mind it reaches.

It’s your natural duty to:

1. Further your mind, which in turn
2. Makes your outputs more valuable and penetrative of the minds you seek to serve, which in turn
3. It provides information about the results of your process as inputs and furthers the minds of those you reach.

[Whitehead’s] capacity for concentration on work was quite extraordinary. One hot summer’s day, when I was staying with him at Grantchester, our friend Crompton Davies arrived and I took him into the garden to say how-do-you-do to his host. Whitehead was sitting writing mathematics. Davies and I stood in front of him at a distance of no more than a yard and watched him covering page after page with symbols. He never saw us, and after a time we went away with a feeling of awe.”
— Bertrand Russell’s autobiography giving a glimpse of Alfred North Whitehead’s Focus