Fill er up again

Hello again blogging.

Ive been thinking a lot lately about stimulants. And addiction.  Sugar, caffiene, this always-on always-connected webosphere that we have been thrust into... so many sources of stimulation.  I feel that this rampant context switching is bad for my brain.  Indeed, I have started losing the ability to focus on things.  Ill be walking around my apartment with my keys in one hand and the next thing  I know I cant find them. Usually be cause I am thinking about 10 other things besides the keys in my hand.

Addiction.  Ive suspected for a while that I'm addicted to problem solving.  I remember getting a book from the library on genetic engineering after a particularly bad breakup in high school.  Whenever I felt overwhelmed with emotion I would just read about genetics.  A distraction from the pain of reality.  When my brain rediscovered the soothing effects of problem solving some years later in college it turned into a hungry beast.  My mind clung to problem solving as a source of pleasure, especially when other areas of my life weren't panning out as desired. Medicated by math.

I feel like we as a society are gorging ourselves.  Gorging on overly sweetened foods our bodies have evolved to seek out.  On caffeinated energy drinks to replace lost sleep from trying to do too much.  On social media - tweeting and blogging and sharing every minute detail of our lives with the world and soaking up everyone else's social media masturbation like a sponge.  While technology has provided us with great advancement it also seems to have given us a potential to take a great step backwards.  We are a world of addicted slaves avoiding the pain of now and therefore also its pleasure.

It is hard to see these things as 'bad' in my opinion.  My addiction to problem solving makes me a highly productive member of society and provides me with income.  Food is food, right? As long as I exercise I should be able to eat whatever I want. Besides, evolution has made my body want to eat this way. We think of cigarettes as bad, not apple danishes. But perhaps that apple danish could have just as bad of an impact on our health.  Especially if you were to chain smoke them.

My family really appreciates that I Facebook everything because I live thousands of miles away from them. Yet how much time have I lost to clicking through posts and pictures of people that mostly I dont know that well? #voyeur

It is with this irony that I decide to blog again. Because I found I either wanted to say something brief on twitter or ramble about something at length.  I think some house cleaning will be going on this winter on many levels.  Some of it Ill reflect on here.