The Wheel of Ixion

Life is like a treadmill, and, even more so the ‘wheel of Ixion,’ as Schopenhauer said. A wheel that never stands still. Schopenhauer uses the wheel of Ixion as a symbolism to describe our incessant will to satisfy our desires.

Ixion, the king of the Lapiths in Greek mythology, attempted to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus, who rules as king of the gods of Mount Olympus. Ixion was punished for this crime by binding to an ever-spinning wheel of fire. Ixion's suffering was eternal.

To Schopenhauer – who was possibly the only prominent philosopher to declare himself a pessimist, happiness was just a fleeting state of not suffering. Samuel Beckett makes this disillusionment more exciting in his novel Watt, which is known for its philosophical and grim humour and deliberately unidiomatic English:

‘The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.’  

We always find ourselves on a fiery wheel of Ixion that keeps spinning.

Social Media, the New Cocaine

If sitting is the new smoking, social media is the new cocaine.  

About social media, a former Mozilla employee, during an interview with BBC’s Panorama programme this week, said that ‘it's as if social media companies are taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.’

As a saying about advertising from the nineteen-seventies goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. They addict you, record your viewing habits, and then trade your time, i.e. sell your data to advertisers.

Every day, three billion Snapchat snaps are exchanged, three hundred and fifty million photos uploaded on Facebook, and close to a hundred million photos shared on Instagram. That mindless scrolling through our social media feeds! That endless checking of our phones!  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit. The list is not exhaustive.      

They say their aim is to help you connect with the world, although conversely we have lost the real connection. We have books – iBooks, Kindle, etc., but we don’t read them. We have hundreds of friends, albeit on Facebook and other social media platforms, but we don’t talk to them. The more online friends we have, the less real friends we have.

A report by the Education Policy Institute in the UK last year suggested that moderate use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels may have some benefits for children in building up their resilience, developing their social skills, and also enabling them better access to emotional support and help.

But then some things in moderation don’t work. Social media, for most of us, is one of them, hence we invent syndromes such as ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Facebook depression,’ and their bogus solution (one of which is called digital detox). It’s a collective failure. 

Historical Sense

One thing that history teaches us is how tough it is for us to control it.

TS Eliot, in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, says that 'the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence'. Historical sense is a belief that past is not something that is lost or void. The past cohabits with the present.        

A major demerit the lack of historical sense holds is uncritical observance to present-day attitudes, particularly the penchant to understand past events in terms of modern values and concepts. We exaggerate our present problems unrealistically in terms of seriousness and importance to those that have occurred in the past. We erroneously believe that current situations are much worse than they had earlier been.   

We often fail to acknowledge that the present modifies the history as the history modifies the present. 

As Adam Gopnik puts it, the only wisdom history supplies is historical wisdom.