plato's cave
I'm in the hinterlands now...
Each week I stay off of Instagram (and Amazon!) I feel more and more in a separate (not bad, but certainly odd) parallel reality. I have made my phone very boring – it is just a phone now, and a camera, and a weather and maps app. It doesn’t hold the wondrous worlds of everybody doing (performing?) everything.
Without my old main social – Instagram - it’s like I come to you through the mists of time. It’s like I ride Shadowfax up a tall mountain to light a signal fire, rather than just rolling over in bed and picking up my phone.
Since I’m out on the mountaintop anyway, it seems like a good time to bring up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
The basic story is written as a conversation between Socrates and Plato’s brother Glaucon; and while I am no philosophy scholar, I’ll do my best to outline the key points:
In this allegory Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles to face an inner wall in a cave with a fire burning bright behind them. On the back side of the wall they are chained to, there are puppeteers who use the firelight to create a shadow-play with puppets and other objects, projecting shadows onto the wall the prisoners can see.
All that these chained-up people see is shadows projected onto the wall – that’s all they’ve ever seen, so they think that is reality.
Then, we are asked to imagine one person is unchained and drawn towards the mouth of the cave. First, the fire almost blinds him with its brightness compared to the shadow reflections on the wall. Then, suppose that person is brought all the way out of the cave into the light of the world lit with sunlight. First, he can’t see at all, it is too bright compared to the cave, but once his eyes adjust again, he now sees a whole wondrous new level of reality.
That person, would have trouble seeing when he went BACK into the cave, just as he did when he first went into the sunlight; and others there, still in the cave, would see his trouble seeing the shadows on the cave wall as something that arouses their pity. “Poor guy, he can’t see”.
It is probably cliché’, but sometimes things are because they are true, but leaving Insta feels a lot like being the person from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who is unchained, led out of the cave, eyes at first blinded by the actual sunlight of life (rather than the blue light of the screen), and then becoming the one who sees the “real” world and goes back to tell the other folks in the cave.
Some days I feel I’ve gone back in time, to whatever year it was that I first loaded a social media app onto my phone.
Some days I feel like I’m in the future, that soon, a lot of people will be joining me in this more friction-y, yet also more profound way of being.
Some days I wonder if I will ever go back “in there”.
Other days I try to figure out a way to be back in there with everyone without getting chained up again myself.
As I begin my third month out of a space that wasn’t good for me* (again, not telling anyone else what is “good” or “bad” or they “should” or “should not do”) I find myself occasionally missing the ease of the “invisible audience” that I imagined shared that space with me. It wasn’t at all real, but it was psychologically and even emotionally comforting. I opened my phone and there everyone was, at any time, day or night. Or, at least the spectre of themselves was there.
Maybe you’ll agree with me, or at least know what I mean when I say that I feel like there is a theater in my mind where I stand on stage and look out at all the seats. I think we all have a mind-theater like this. Everyone we “know”(in real life and online) is in their seats. When I was on Instagram, those seats were filled in the thousands, strangers and people I knew in real life, but mostly strangers. When I left the app, a lot of those seats became empty, mostly the ones filled by people I didn’t really know. Those seat fillers, for all the ease of “seeing” them, after all, were parasocial at best.
The hilarious thing is that those seat fillers weren’t really people that were perceiving me – I mean, maybe a little bit, but you know just as something to scroll by and maybe like. The real invisible audience was the Instagram algorithm disguised as all those seat-filling people – Mr. Algo and his coterie of advertisers were actually filling the majority of the seats.
I’ve also been around a lot of young people lately (teens and early/mid twenties). I am struck by the fact that their whole lives, they’ve been dealing with the psychological cost of feeling always watched by their devices, AND also always wondering, if no one is watching, am I even real?
But, of course, every time we look into the screen of a device, someone is always watching – just might be more corporate than human.
I’ve also keyed in on how people are using AI as a substitute for friendship, even relationships. This is Plato’s Cave on steroids to me.
Again, I am not telling anyone to not use AI, or Amazon or anything Meta or X. I am just your reporter on the front lines, just getting out of caves and reporting back.*
UPDATE on NEW LIBRARY:
1. You all did an amazing job cancelling your accounts for the now-archived Streamer’s Library.
2. I’ve figured out the basics on the New Library, and you are welcome to sign up if you like. This is kind of like me welcoming you into a house that has a foundation, plumbing, electricity and walls, but isn’t fully built out and decorated. Over the next month or so, I am planning to add a lot to this space, but there are over 175 experiences already waiting for you in there.
3. If you have a lot of time left on your old Streamer’s account please write to me and I will send you a discount code BEFORE you sign up for the new space. For whatever reason, discount codes on Squarespace member’s area can only be used right when you start.
Remember, even if you’ve cancelled your old Streamer’s account, you can still log-in for the rest of your active time remaining. And, as always, you can write to me with any questions - I’m answering all messages myself as promptly as I can.
If you are wondering whether you would like to be a member of the New Library, or if the Friday Substack is more for you, this is how I’ve been describing it…
The Friday Substack, with its two pieces of audio – a little talk and a mini-meditation – is for those who want that little talk and that meditation to center their practice around each week. This option also gives you access to the full archive of Tuesday and Friday posts, so I believe a really high value for $5/month or $50/year.
The New Library is for folks who want to have day-dream, visualization, meditation experiences on the regular. This space is for those who like listening to a meditation every afternoon as a break, or every night when they go to bed. This space is for someone doing deep dives every day – and wants a BIG LIBRARY to choose from. In the near future, this library will also be a place where you can take mini-courses on the strange variety of things I am actually an expert on – the lunar cycle, SoulCollage®, magic (as many and as often as you like) - and where… perhaps, we will be hosting special events for library members. I feel this is also a really high value for $10/month or $100/year.
As you likely already know, key features of both of these spaces is that I am NOT data mining you, I’m NOT influencing you, I’m NOT making money from running ads or paid posts. The spaces I run on the internet – this Substack, youaremagicla.com – do not play by the rule that money justifies any bad behavior to “Make it on the Internet”. I make my living one micro-transaction at time, but I do this work because it is my purpose, a mandate from my soul.
If you are new and want to try out these experiences before you commit, don’t forget about the Free Page!
SO MUCH gratitude to you all, your nice messages, your kind patience, your love for these weird little internet spaces.
Until next time,
Jess
* For the record, the reason I’m off Meta and Amazon is that I got so mad seeing those tech bros sitting in the front row for the inauguration of this current Republican administration. Fully understanding that every time I gave them my attention they made more money, I decided to remove myself from those spaces in order that I not help them be successful. I removed myself for moral reasons, I don’t want my eyeballs or a buy now button to every give them even one more penny to do their dark deeds.
I left FB about 8 years ago. I never was on Twitter or X, so I didn’t have to worry about “quitting” that space. I am going to be the last hold-out on AI, I would never knowingly use it, because I recognize it is just another way to pretend we have friends in order for them to data mine us on a more massive scale with dire ecological repercussions.
I could not have stayed off Insta without Sky Fusco’s Tune In, Drop Out group – it helped me re-fill some seats in the theater – as have consciously doing the work to really show up for my relationships in daily, real life.
Also, for the record – I still use Google, Substack (obviously) and YouTube. I would like to diminish my involvement with Google, but their tentacles are so wound around everything - it would take some planning.
I feel like it is important for me to acknowledge nuance here. Again, never, ever, am I telling anyone what they “should” do. Things are very hard right now on the collective scale. Little treats are necessary. Sometimes we are just making it through the best we can.
I don’t know the details of your life (especially now, being off Insta lol) and I don’t want anything to be harder for you in this already hard era. Instagram may be a great place for you, Amazon might be saving your bacon a few times a week (especially if you are a mother - every mom I’ve told I’m off Insta and Amazon seems to feel living without Insta is possible, but leaving Amazon behind would be impossible. As a mom, I totally get this, living without Amazon makes getting things for the household much more laborious and time-consuming. We are already working hard as parents, the last thing I want is to make it harder.)
All I really want for us, now, is to keep waking up, over and over again. For me, that includes waking up from the trance Insta had me in. For you, it might be waking up to a new way you can move through life less mesmerized, hypnotized. From talking a walk in the morning or meditating before a meeting, there are lots of ways to wake up and… I think we can all see, now is a good time to do it.
Lots of love,
Jess
“Gaia has no church because she doesn’t need one. Nor is there a need for any ritual other than high-focus care for a plant, wild animal, the bees or any form of nature within your orb. Heirloom seeds are more valuable than hymns.”
- Mystic Medusa
“Everything we regard as real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
- Niels Bohr, father of quantum physics
"Somehow, the changing of consciousness is deemed to be threatening to the state. Now, why is that? Is the state somehow playing a shell game, that would be exposed, if people were to actually open their eyes? In what way does the expansion of consciousness threaten industrial democracies? I believe we need real answers to this."
- Terence McKenna
“The way to keep the digital world sane is to draw from outside of it.”
- Charles Eisenstein
“Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it because in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened more to myself.”
-Georgia O'Keeffe
“Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal, while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before.”
-Herodotus
“Get a hobby! It sounds dismissive, but I am dead serious. I feel so fulfilled and satisfied after doing my little crafts and whatnot. I’ve become feverishly obsessed with my little projects and tinkerings. They remind me how capable I am of creating my own contentedness. It’s a soothing thought that more than tides me over as I count the increasing number of white hairs sprouting from my temples.
Do shit that doesn’t involve looking at screens (and especially not at hot people performing hotness on screens), acquire a skill, create something with your hands. Learn to cook an elaborate meal (this is a big one for me). Talk to your loved ones—they’re often a way better mirror than the one in your hand. Redefine beauty beyond its visual constraints. You might find that beauty culture doesn’t feel as relevant when you’re busy doing other shit that makes you feel capable and proud. I don’t know that we are able to individually extricate ourselves from the great contradiction of Beauty™. But akin to grief, what we can do is build a meaningful life around it until it doesn’t feel as daunting.”
- Sable Young, Hard Feelings
“Turning to primordial goo is an interesting process, I must say. I’m glad I still have fingers to type with, so I can relay the juiciness of it to you. Most of it is beyond words, anyway - so even if my fingers succumb as well it won’t matter. But just like the caterpillar, who in metamorphosis no longer knows itself as such (if ever it did), there remains a semblance of self - something beyond transitory, ultimately meaningless forms of identity. It’s deeper than that, more cosmic, more rooted - infinite. The imaginal cells do just that: they imagine. New forms await.”
- Devany Amber Wolfe - FaeWolfe
“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”
― Jack Kerouac
"It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things."
- Okakura Kakuzō
I loved your imagery play of the mind theatre and the algorithm filled seats. A poetic insight into the mental and emotional hijacking of the individual that is social media's agenda. Vive le frisson!
SO tempted to just delete all social media apps from my phone!