The Birds and the Wasteland

"The world without spirit is a wasteland. ... The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to ... become alive yourself." — Joseph Campbell

In 1987, ornithologists filmed and recorded a male Hawaiian Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird singing its mating song. One scientist later said that watching the rare bird was a “peak experience” of his life.

The song was supposed to be a duet with distinct pauses to be filled by its female counterpart. Only there were no female Kauaʻi ʻōʻō’s left.

The bird kept singing, kept pleading for a future that could no longer be.

Today, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō and its relatives of the Hawaiian honeyeater family are extinct.

“He is the last male of a species singing for a female who will never come.” — Newsweek

It’s a haunting song. It left me wondering what song I would sing if I were the last of my kind on earth.

What would you still feel compelled to do if you found yourself a lonely witness to the end of time? Beyond caring for your survival, what would you do if your entire social structure disappeared, if status and achievement lost their meaning, if ambition was pointless? What would you do, for its own sake, until the last of your days?

I believe you would do your version of what the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō did. You would follow your nature. You would strain against the momentous forces that left you stranded in the wasteland. You would do what makes you feel alive.

At least, that’s what I imagine I would do.

I think I would be writing and singing. Which sounds absurd because there would be nobody around to read or listen.

But I believe we all yearn to sing the song of our soul. I’m not saying we all literally want to sing, but that it is in our nature to express our experience of life — through any creative practice, be it writing, drawing, crafting, carving, building, playing an instrument, singing, dancing, connecting, painting, etc. Anything from making a sandcastle to starting a business counts if you do it as an authentic expression of your soul.

This is how Rick Rubin defined art.

We are performing for an audience of one. … If you think, “I don’t like it but someone else will,” you are not making art for yourself. You’ve found yourself in the business of commerce, which is fine; it just may not be art. — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

I agree. To me, art is done for its own sake. It doesn’t have to stand for something or encode deep meaning. It doesn’t have to look or sound or feel a certain way. It doesn’t even have to be beautiful, but it does have to carry the glow of the artist’s soul. We perceive art with our senses and judge it with our minds, but it resonates with our deeper selves. Even if we dislike a piece, we may recognize that it carries a spark.

I believe the last human birds would make art and thus leave their footprints in the river of time.

Where is he going with this, you wonder.

What if those momentous forces are creating a wasteland as we speak? What if you’re about to be the last bird?

You think I’m being dramatic. Maybe I am. But overly dramatic? I don’t think so.

midjourney

Art must have a soul. Entertainment doesn’t. You can make content that serves commerce and, as Rubin pointed out, that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a different thing. It’s just business.

Merchants have long figured out that it’s a lot more effective to trigger our emotions than to reason with our minds. It’s Marketing 101. Make people feel. Tap into their instincts. Lead with fear or desire. Sex sells. Our world has become drenched in content and communication serving commerce. It makes for a drab and uninspiring environment that can feel like a wasteland at times. But that’s old news and not what I’m talking about.

They Live

In a recent piece, Iain McGilchrist explained how humanity’s perception and thinking are increasingly biased towards the brain’s left hemisphere with its “narrow-beam attention.” To the left hemisphere, everything is “abstract, decontextualized, disembodied, categorized, general in nature, and reduced to its parts.” McGilchrist illustrated the implications of this imbalance with the example of schizophrenia. Schizophrenics, he explained, “see a world of bits and pieces, and they often imagine that people have become inanimate, machine-like, or zombies.”

From that perspective, you look at a person and no longer see a conscious human being with a soul. Instead, you see what Scott Adams called a ‘moist robot.’

This is highly effective when it comes to sales. You study the human robot’s circuitry, learn how to hack it, find a way to reach it, push the right buttons, and watch money pour out.

Maybe you write a sales letter and explain how ‘they’ are manipulating and destroying the economy. The reader’s best hope is to subscribe to your newsletter containing secret stock market insights. Or maybe you formulate a supplement and serve me an ad right after I browse ADHD memes.

It works.

I hate that it works.

Now, what if you took the human robot philosophy to its extreme?

Time to put on a snuggie, strap on your Vision Pro, and climb into your pod.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. … it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated. … Everything is getting turned into TikTok. — Ted Gioia, The State of the Culture, 2024

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The dopamine cartel

In his recent must-read piece, Ted Gioia shared a chart on what he called ‘dopamine culture’. The “new culture”, he explained, is defined by “the absence of Culture (with a capital C).” The new culture is not even entertainment. Everything is being replaced by “compulsive activity.”

In other words, it’s a culture of addiction to stimulating distraction. This culture “can last forever”, Gioia warned, “because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics.” It’s haunting and impossible to unsee.

Everything is “getting turned into TikTok” because it is profitable and presents a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: if you don’t exploit the dopamine loop, your competitors will. And there’s no need to lose sleep about it. Engagement metrics show that you’re just giving consumers the moist robots what they crave. “Some companies get people hooked with pills and needles,” Gioia explained. “Others with apps and algorithms. But either way, it’s just churning out junkies.” He called the corporate overlords of this wasteland the “dopamine cartel.”

Creatives face a version of Gresham’s law which states that “bad money drives out good”. If attention, and thus economic value, is being captured by dopamine culture, how can you justify doing anything else? If your audience is just a group of moist robots, why not make good money by providing them with the ‘short and sweet’ sugar hits they crave?

If people want to sleep in a prison, wouldn’t it be reasonable to provide them with pleasant distractions?

And thus we all join the poison merchants. It’s the rational thing to do. In the wasteland of dopamine culture, you either deliver hits at high speed or you’re going out of business. You’ll make art by yourself and for yourself. You’ll be the last bird, chirping while the algo tends to the pods.

human pods in The Matrix

The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. … addicts still pursue the stimulus, but more to avoid the pain of dopamine deprivation. — Ted Gioia, The State of the Culture, 2024

Yes, yes, I know: In material terms, things are getting better. People are being lifted out of poverty, we build unreasonably large houses, cars come with more cup holders than mirrors, and your pet has premium health insurance. But spiritually, the world is ailing.

Gioia’s chart points to a culture that is not just stuck but dead. If you abdicate your attention to addiction, you stop being ‘you’ and accept your robot-ness. You step into the pod, make yourself comfortable, and say thank you. What’s most insidious is that it feels oh so good to slip away into delicious unconsciousness. Why listen to birds when you can be comfortably numb?

You think I’m being dramatic. Maybe I am. But overly dramatic? I don’t think so.

Ask your soul about what’s happening. Or ask someone else, if you can get them off their phone for a minute.

Enough with the doom and gloom, I hear you moan. No more diagnosis for today.

You got it. Let me stare at the tea leaves for a moment. Maybe Mr. Earl Grey can help.

The answer is not nostalgia. The answer is not to demonize technology, progress, social media, or ban short-form video. The answer is to go looking for a vision of what comes after dopamine culture.

The answer is also not to accelerate and push harder for progress. Silicon Valley doesn’t have the answer because it’s not a business. Dopamine culture efficiently scales and is unreasonably profitable. But what comes after will look unreasonable and inefficient.

That’s because the answer to a dead culture must be an alive one.

The world without spirit is a wasteland. ... Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself. — Joseph Campbell

An alive culture replaces distraction and escapism with mindful attention, direct experience, active participation, creative expression, deep connection, genuine sharing, and lasting community (in other words, it’s a utopia!).

In an alive culture, you follow what is interesting rather than having your mind be fed for profit. In an alive culture, you listen with intent and open yourself to awe. An alive culture requires effort and vulnerability. In exchange, it offers adventure and divine sparkle in seemingly mundane moments. An alive culture is deeply human, soul-focused, and utterly unreasonable from today’s perspective.

But the only answer to a dead culture is to envision, embody, build, and share an alive one.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. — G. K. Chesterton

The oasis

If you’re lost in the desert, your job is to find a source of water. You must find an oasis or perish.

If you find yourself in a wasteland, you must find a place where you can nourish your soul. You must find a sacred space where you can reconnect with the source of life.

Nobody will walk this path for you.

On the contrary, the world will tempt you to return to sleep every step of the way. Why walk with your thirst for life when you can comfortably scroll the feed and be fed a hundred good ideas that you can bookmark and forget?

The oasis is out there but you have to keep yourself on track.

I can’t offer you a map. But I can point you to the guides.

Put the phone down and listen.

In his strange and enchanting autobiography A Book of Life, classicist and mystic Peter Kingsley wrote about his meditations among the birds. Birds, he explained, are not just singing for each other. No, they are signing for you. Birds are calling you “to break out of your husks and sprout from the seeds you were sown as. Birds are singing to “draw us away entirely from ourselves” and into a different state of awareness.

… the fact that different kinds of birds have different songs is the foundation of all the divine mysteries. This is why ancient traditions spoke about the language of the birds and were so quick to connect deciphering it with the skills of prophecy. — Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

What does it mean to sit and listen to birds around you? It means to open your perception. It means to shift your emphasis from the brain’s left hemisphere to the right, from a focus on the narrow to allowing the whole. When the bird’s messages are no longer heard, Kingsley warns, “Our whole world falls apart.”

“Listen well,” he wrote, and you could “hear the whole story of our world: where it came from, what it will be, how it was, the way it is.” In the unfiltered experience of nature, every part tells the story of the whole.

Be quiet and listen. Listen to the song that has been sung since before you were born and that will echo long after the last of us gazes at the sky.

The answer to a dead culture starts with silence.

The answer to a dead culture starts with listening.

The answer to a dead culture starts with the song of birds and the beating of our hearts.

The answer to a dead culture emerges when you realize how truly and deeply alive you can be.

Then you start walking.

What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God. — Iain McGilchrist