The Shocking Truth, Ctd

Recently the Dish noted new research suggesting that people prefer getting electric shocks to being alone with their thoughts. Remarking on the study, Damon Linker gives our restlessness an existentialist gloss. He turns to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger for an explanation of why we crave distraction:

Heidegger proposed that we human beings are uniquely terrified of our own mortality because we’re more keenly aware than any other animal of all we have to lose by dying. Each of us inhabits a world overflowing with meaning. We care deeply, almost infinitely, about ourselves, our lives, our loved ones. And the prospect of losing it all — of the world and everything in it winking out of existence when we cease to be — is unspeakably horrifying. Heidegger also suggested that we spend much of our lives fleeing from the fact of our finitude, throwing ourselves into the world and its concerns, including technological distractions and diversions.

But there are also moments when the truth reveals itself to us. This happens in certain moods, among them anxiety and boredom, when a dawning awareness of the groundlessness of our ordinary, everyday pursuits transfigures the world. When that happens we grasp as we otherwise rarely do that our lives are lived hovering over an abyss that at some level we know with complete certainty will eventually — perhaps a mere moment from now — swallow us whole, along with everything we’ve ever cared about.

Nothingness: that is what we’re trying to wave away when we reach for our phones in line at the grocery store, and when the obtrusive music played during a meal rescues us from what would otherwise be an excruciatingly awkward silence.

(Image of sketch of Heidegger via Arturo Espinosa)