The Virtue of Doing Nothing

The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you lose it.

--The Tao

In the media, the virtues of "doing" are extolled non-stop and the simple pleasures of being, with nothing added or subtracted, are completely ignored. Eventually life itself gets distorted, if not by the content of the media, but, as Marshall McCluhan intimated in his famous quote "the medium is the message," by the sheer volume and stimulation of its delivery system. This stimulation can lead to numbness, anxiety, and a restlessness that is never sated, no matter how much stimulus is absorbed.

It can also lead to the worship of false idols, from film stars to whomever is the latest fad. We watch enviously as other people lead a big life and are constantly told that we are free to do the same. We can buy anything we want to buy. Go anywhere we want to go. Be anything we want to be.

But how free are we when according to the A.C. Nielsen Company the average American watches 3 hours and 46 minutes of TV each day (more than 52 days of nonstop TV-watching per year). By age 65 the average American will have spent nearly 9 years glued to the tube. Nine years of passive entraining as one's precious life drips by.

Almost all television programming exists only to sell you something. Nine years spent learning to consume. Like it or not, this is a massive dose of conditioning being mainlined directly into your mind. To absorb it in a state of passivity breeds more passivity. And although it may seem to relieve loneliness, think of the last time you watched a lot of television. Did you feel more or less connected to life at the end of it? Did you feel more or less lonely and disconnected? And when you shut it off, were you recharged or drained? Did the silence replacing the television feel sweet or did you want more television?

This is how elephants are trained. They start out with a chain staked to the ground and the baby elephants are tied to the chain, walking around the stake. As they get older, the elephants are easily able to break free of the chain by simply walking away. Yet they don't. Their minds have been conditioned that they can't break the chains and so they don't even try.

In much the same way the media conditions us, especially the tremendously potent medium of television. It's important to see through this conditioning that is telling us how to live, what our values are, what our politics should be. And to identify the ways in which we are being conditioned. Most people aren't aware of the extent of media dominance in our culture, but the world is saturated with messages selling something. According the Center for Media Literacy, Americans are exposed to over 3,000 ads a day through different forms of media, including 60 channels of TV, movies showing at the local theatre or on video, airwaves full of radio talk and music, newspapers, magazines, and books. We are like robots programmed to consume from early childhood, told what we need to be happy. America, with 6 percent of the world's population, owns 59 percent of the world's wealth, and yet we still don't feel that we have enough.

The truth is, we need nothing beyond the simplicity of the moment. But commercials create an itch that can never be gotten rid of; the more you scratch, the more you want.

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