You won’t know what a subphylum urochordata is, until I give you its more common name, the sea squirt.
Then you begin to picture it. You’ve seen hundreds of them, clamped to rocks and piers. ‘Sea squirt’ describes its existence, letting sea water in at one end – filtering the nutrients – and squirting it out the other end.
Water in… filter… expel. Repeat. Die.
The thing about the sea squirt is that it doesn’t know there’s more to life. It doesn’t ponder. It doesn’t reminisce. It doesn’t dream of better days ahead.
Why doesn’t the sea squirt raise its aspirations? The simple answer is because it can’t. When it was a baby squirt, it paddled around until it found a rock, attached itself, got comfy and then ate its own brain. The squirt brain is useful in finding something to attach to but, once that bit’s done, it doesn’t need to think anymore so it scoffs it, thus providing a bit of sustenance so it can hang on for the rest of its sea squirty life.
At Art of Brill we think there might be a human equivalent? People who have settled on their rock and, metaphorically, they’ve eaten their brains.
Example? Let’s take the modern phenomenon of busyness. We’re all super busy. But we may well be busy doing the wrong things. If, as surveys suggest, young people are spending 9 hours a day online (which incidentally is more time than they spend sleeping) then by age 80 they will have clocked up 30 solid years of wi-fi access.
That’s a lot of screen time.
So it’s worth considering what we are doing with that screen time?
In Britain, there’s a TV series called Gogglebox which I’m led to believe is where we, the intelligent viewer, get to watch people watching television. One day soon I’m going to record myself watching Gogglebox and post it on FaceTube so people can watch me watching people watching people watch TV. Then maybe you can record yourself watching my FaceTube channel and we can keep adding people until the world’s watching people watching people watching people watching people watching people watching people watch TV… until the penny finally drops in a mass kerching moment of realization.
Virtually living isn’t actually living. Collectively, we’ve scoffed our own brains! We’ve been sucked into a vortex of meaninglessness.
Good news, it’s not too late to fight back. There’s a cure. It’s called The Art of Being Brilliant.