Earlier this month a longtime friend sent me one of his favorite quotes from Ecclesiastes: “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.” He added a modern refrain: “And spikes our anxiety.” I thought about it the next morning when I went for a pre-dawn walk. This time of the year I get up early because one of the great joys is to listen to the early songbirds. I have been doing it since elementary school. The city is quiet, there is no traffic, no one on the prowl to ambush me with a cheery “Good morning!” I listen to the birds, sometimes I can smell a lawn that was trimmed the evening before, or various flowers.
Most mornings are the best part of the day, especially when that brief passage from the ancient wisdom literature oozes back into my brain and haunts me like a song I cannot get out of my mind. I smile and am grateful I am out for a stroll, not on a nature study tour to increase my knowledge.
I don’t think that passage has ever been more true than it is today, but probably everyone generation would have said about the same thing. Add the words, “and spikes our anxiety” and we definitely know we are looking at today’s mindset and mood.
I do not think that our disquiet is created solely because of the headline news, nor even the click-bait of less prominent, but always bad or scary news. Rather, it is a lifetime of unsettling experiences that increases our sorrow and anxiety. To that, we add the vicarious bad or frightening news in the lives of others, especially people we know. It is a case of too much knowledge and too much information.
Growing up, my sister and I rode in the front seat of Mother’s Buick Roadmaster. It had a powerful engine and really good brakes. Back in that era, cars did not have seatbelts, and the only thing that kept us from flying out the windshield was Mother’s right arm that she would flail across us when she touched the brakes. A classmate, Marlene, wasn’t so lucky. She was a front seat passenger in an accident. We went to her funeral a week later. I never trusted the might and strength of Mother’s right arm after that. Now, I cannot move my car half way down the driveway without buckling up.
A couple of decades later I moved to northern Alberta, Canada. I took off without a map, knowing all I had to do was head north, cross the border and turn left ninety miles later when I got to Winnipeg. I kept following the sun until I got to Moose Jaw, turned right, and watched for a sign several hundred miles north that said, “Grand Centre.” I was there. That was it, and all done without one of those accordion-style road maps. Last week a friend called and said they would need a ride from O’Hare Airport, adding that it was only 200 miles from Saugatuck. I have better sense now and said, “Take a bus. It’s too dangerous a drive.”
I threatened my sister that I might return to the old hometown this summer for my high school class reunion. It will be the 55th year since we cross the stage to get our diploma, much to the relief of The Olds. Someone got worried that so many classmates are falling off their perch we ought to get together every five years instead of ten. (There you have it: the adult knowledge of our mortality compared to when we graduated and KNEW we were immortal.)
Her first words were, “Oh, I don’t think you really want to do that. I doubt there is anyone you will remember.” It was her way of saying, “I don’t want you to do it. Rochester is too dangerous and riddled with crime, and besides, most them are gone or their minds are away with the fairies. Besides, what makes you think any of them want to see you?”
Her husband later whispered, “If you come she’ll slip one of those luggage trackers into a pocket so she can keep track of you.” Good to know, but that is just the incentive I need to attend this get-together. Before I leave for home, I’ll palm it off to one of my classmates, maybe the one who lives in The Villages in Florida. That will free me from the sorrow of being tracked and spike her anxiety when she thinks I’ve made a run for it. That may be the high point of the weekend.
It is this mad rush forward in technology that I find so demoralizing. I had an interesting conversation with a teacher who dearly loves to teach but is running up against the tech challenges. She said that students don’t know how to do research for a paper. Back in the day we spent hours in libraries, making notes on 3 by 5-inch cards, and laboriously pecked out an outline, rough draft, and then a final one on a manual Underwood typewriter. Today, she lamented, they type a question on some Artificial Intelligence website, and let it do the work for them.
Thank goodness, most schools are on their summer break by now. On the afternoon of June 10, I got an emergency message that CHAT GPT is down. Just think of the spike in adolescent anxiety that students might have to write their own term paper, mash notes to their sweetie, or plan a date night. Terrible. Call out the trauma counselors.
“They don’t know how to talk with each other,” she said. I thought of the Café Culture for which Paris is famous. People meet at a cafe and talk live, in person, face to face. They can dawdle over a two-ounce industrial strength espresso for hours. Jean Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir met every morning at the Deux Maggot and wrote most of the papers and books at the café. Now people text, and if they don’t like something they read, instead of debating it, they cancel each other.
My teacher friend did not mention the really spooky evolving advance: the companion chatbots. A visit to the web site and you can select some ready-made virtual entity, tap some other prompts, and you have your own always-available companion. Want to spend a miserable night with HL Mencken or have a debate with avatars of Johnny Adams and Tommy Jefferson? Go for it.
Even creepier are the other sites that will allow you to submit a few photographs of a deceased individual, perhaps a few recordings of their voice, and fill in some other information. In less time that it takes me to finish this sentence, you can start having a heart-to-heart with an historical figure or former flame. No longer is there a reason to connect with the real world. In fact, maybe the real world is not really real, and we are all somehow caught in a snare or web of AI.
Thinking about these things or ‘increasing knowledge’ is truly saddening. It is not fit content for the brain in the pre-dawn hours while listening to cardinals and robins battling over who can sing the prettiest and loudest song. We feel diminished by the news, and there is nothing we can do about it, anymore than the Luddites were able to stop the spinning wheels and looms that were destroying their way of life.
But, we can escape from the doom and gloom, if only for a little while. I do it through those early morning walks, or again the evening when I go out to remind the birds it is bedtime. Others do it through the performing or visual arts, even if they have no aspirations of making a living from their avocation.
We all find a way to make a break from the harsh realities of life, and hopefully we make good choices.
