During my hours at our kitchen table (amidst Jasmine’s artistic chaos and Josiah’s Warcraft adventures) and café life in Auckland (note, I’m usually at a table), I try to connect the dots. Sometimes it’s relational dots (so I can stay married) and sometimes it’s cultural dots (why younger Christian artists seem to be less cheesy than the older ones).
One of the questions I’ve been trying to understand is our personal inertia. Why do we get stuck in life. On the one hand (or dot), we have gifted identities and dreams and on the other, we have a huge world of need (the other, rather large dot). And yet, we often stand in the middle, fairly paralyzed and unable to move forward and connect these dots. We become passive or else actively engaged in massive wastes of time.
These questions kinda simmer in the back of my overly active mind (I take an hour to fall asleep) until God or man drops a pearl (a beautiful dot) into the picture. Today’s gem came from George Trow who once said that the generation raised on TV (and in my opinion, the net) suffers from Reality Anemia, an experiential and moral bloodlessness.
The story is fairly simple, if you are raised in the context of a digital world, your connection with the real world is heavily tainted and sometimes surrogated by, well, marketers. TV is an advertising medium first and foremost. So your perceptions of self, neighborhood and the world are largely delivered to the comfort of your home via Ruppert Murdoch et al.
In this upbringing, you slowly lose connection with what Trow calls the middle distance between your personal space and MySpace, where 200 million other people share the TV show, net experience or whatever else is forming your world view. If we lose that middle space, we lose our sense of authority, self confidence and adulthood. This causes reality anemia.
Now here’s the dots piece. If we lose connection with the middle space, that place where our real involvement with real people in real neighborhoods (YWAM, take note) forms our skills and relational abilities, then we lose our sense of potential and place in life. We are stuck instead with huge impossible Nike sized expectations of how to look, act and be. Since we can’t become most of these media sponsored people, we lose hope and become inert.
Inertia has an interesting dynamic. Inertia takes whatever energy is present, and keeps you moving with that same momentum. So you are most likely to keep going on whatever motivations you built up from the past. If your digital world has put you in your place (a consumer who can never be like the person selling you something), then you are likely to stay put in that space. If you have dreams but your father told you you’d never make money as an artist, then your momentum will likely take you towards a mindless job, and you will keep moving in that direction. If you are stuck with a low self esteem, then you will stay stuck.
Until perhaps, you can reconnect with that middle space.
In the church, we often try to stoke each other up into action (and out of our inertia). We use anecdotes and stories to get ‘psyched’. But isn’t that the same problem? The digital world has been ‘psyching’ us for decades. What we need is real middle world space to grow in. I don’t go from couch potato to UN delegate. I go from the remote control to starting a cleanup program in my neighborhood. And from there, to joining the city council’s youth department to try and help out there… As we take natural middle space steps, we start to see the ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ part that God gave us and build on it.
In giving what we can, where we can, we see who we are and who we are not. It doesn’t have to be huge, it just has to be substantial enough to move us away from a screen, away from benign jobs and a small view of self. Jesus summed it up by calling us to love our neighbor. That’s movement, even if it’s just across the street. For many, the biggest step they will ever make.