Overcoming Hedonia Through Open-source Projects
I do not watch much television now but last week I watched the latest series of Line of Duty - a BBC One thriller about unearthing corruption in the police. The series left me a nervous wreck. The stimulation amplified having abstained for so long.
I watched a lot of television from child- to adulthood. Television was both an escape from boredom and the path to novel ideas. I wonder now, naively, if TV does encourage incessant novelty-searching, and shortens our attention span to less stimulating activities such as reading, writing and drawing, a life of television consumption cannot be good preparation for a career in science. The benefits of high-quality science for a country is obvious. Why then, I wonder, would the state not attempt to limit the TV consumption of its subjects?
Perhaps such a regulation would constrain our freedom to choose or a broadcaster's freedom to offer. And television is a relatively mild stimulant anyway - what harm does it really do? A conspiracist might argue it is part of the entertainment-industrial capitalist plan to constantly stimulate people until they are too weary to think and act for themselves.
Depressive hedonia is the inability to do anything except pursue pleasure [1]. Binging on television, hourly-checking of tweets, scanning Facebook walls are common activities now that are embedded in the "communicative sensation-stimulus matrix". While some argue this foraging for novelty taps into the same neuro-mechanisms ancient humans leveraged to forage for food [2]. Fisher argues the causes are largely social: young people are "stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services" [1]. Fisher writes:
Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
Substitute Particle Physics, Cosmology or Evolutionary Biology for Nietzsche in the previous sentence and it would still hold. Prof Brian Cox impresses his viewers with simulations of collapsing stars and inspires teens to study Physics at university but the day-to-day monotony of equations, programming and thinking about abstract stars does not give the same easy kick as consuming Cox's show.
Science was an amateur pursuit of the upper class British and French gentry in the 18th and 19th century. These men had sufficient education and leisure time which the lower classes did not. Yet despite the lower classes (myself included) having this education and leisure time today we decide not to pursue science as a hobby. We would rather spend our time foraging through the entertainment-industrial complex.
This paradox - despite having more leisure time and education, people choose easy-to-consume, purposeless pleasure - is partly explained by the stranded position Fisher describes. And yet since this position is an intermediate between two lower states (or traps) it should be interpreted as an opportunity to break free and pursue difficult, meaningful projects, ideally in the arts just like the upper class gentry used to do.
It is important to pursue projects that give life meaning. The ever-growing open-source movement, people writing code which they host publicly on GitHub for example, is a fantastic project and an example of citizen science. Perhaps this is an example of where I am wrong. A counter-example where people are willing to spend their leisure time doing science and working on difficult projects that have meaning.
Alastair Clarke
12th May, 2019
References
[1] Fisher, M., 2006, Reflexive Impotence, k-punk. Available at: https://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007656.html. Accessed: 11th May 2019.
[2] Gazzaley, A., Rozen, L. D., 2017, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, The MIT Press.