Hello! This week marks the official birthday of the Scroll Sanity podcast, a project that I have been gestating for many years. Thanks to Reddit (the internet isn’t all terrible!), I met someone who is also on the digital mindfulness journey and who has podcasting experiencing. I am so excited to introduce you all to my co-host, Nic DiBella, and I hope that you’ll give our inaugural episode a listen. It’s available on Substack and anywhere you listen to podcasts.
I want to expand on something I mentioned in the podcast: the joy of not knowing everything all the time. What I mean by that is, without a smartphone, there are so many things I simply cannot know anymore with a tap of my fingertip. Do I know what time the restaurant opens? No. Do I know what the weather will be tomorrow? No. Do I know if Lana del Rey is her real name? No. I don’t know.
My son wants to go straight to library after preschool but I don’t know if the library is open on President’s Day. I guess I’ll have to drive there and find out. (It was.)
I am finding a perverse joy, a strange fascination with this state of being — this “I don’t know” state of being. It’s such an unusual feeling, to not know things nowadays. We can know everything in a matter of seconds! Every piece of information that ever was known is inside the device that sits in your pocket. We know exactly what minute we’ll arrive at the parking lot of the event, what time the rain will begin in the morning, how many inches it will rain.
With all of this information, it’s easy to forget that we live in a mysterious and magical world, and that we have that mystery and magic in us. So much is still unknown, like who you’ll bump into waiting in line at the concert, or when the daffodil bud will burst. We don’t know how the air will glow while it rains through sunshine, or what fate has in store for us.
It is my opinion that all of this information has made humans pretty big-headed. We’re just a bunch of know-it-alls. But do we really… know it all?
I went to the co-op recently to buy a tincture that my friend recommended. I remembered the name of the tincture, but when the saleslady asked me for the name of the brand, I didn’t know. She looked at me with sheer exasperation. How could I not know? Didn’t I know how many different brands of tinctures existed? She sighed loudly and muttered her annoyance as she peered at the vials on her shelf. Every now and then, she’d turn towards me and ask again about the brand, then let out a big sigh when, again, I came up empty. I had to stop myself from laughing.
I knew that, without a smartphone, I had a good excuse not to know this obscure detail. I almost wanted to offer that as an apology, but I decide to sit with the unease instead, to lean into this unusual feeling. I don’t need to explain or apologize for something as simple as not knowing a piece of information. Since when has this become such a sin?
It’s a humbling feeling to be reduced to a mere mortal, just a human being with no digital technology to come to our rescue.
I realize now that I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with any amount of not knowing—even the most obscure and meaningless fact must be known the minute the question flits through my brain.
But what about bigger things? The threat of the unknown is always there, giving me anxiety and stealing my sleep.
Does all of this bombardment of information, all of this false certainty of knowing it all, make us more resilient? Or more fragile?
I’d say it’s a distraction from deeper knowing, the knowing that doesn’t come from a device, but maybe from somewhere inside of you.
In the end, we couldn’t find the tincture my friend had recommended, but the saleslady finally forgave my flaws and together we found something that fit my needs.
The truth is, we cannot know everything that will happen in life. Read
’s book, Between Two Kingdoms, and you will see how life can happen in unexpected and unimaginable ways. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking so much about this question of not knowing, because I’m reading about the unforeseen turns that Suleika’s life took and I’m sitting with the knowledge that someone I love is entering hospice care, that tender time of end-of-life.For me, I want to lose my big head. I want to re-acquaint myself with the reality that all is not known. I want to accept the unknown, instead of feeling anxious about it. All of this information at our disposal is giving us a false sense of control, of all-knowingness. More importantly, it is obscuring other ways of knowing that may be equally, if not more, important.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: “We are not spiritual beings having a human experience. We are spiritual beings have a human experience.” (Speaking of information at our fingertips, I never knew who said this quote until I Googled it just now…)
This is something else I mentioned in the podcast: I gave up my smartphone because I felt like I was becoming spiritually sick. This is the truth. How did I know I was becoming spiritually sick? Because I couldn’t be alone with myself.
My spiritual life is not something that I have written much about in this newsletter, but it is an important part of my life. In our modern life, we don’t have much room for such things, because they don’t provide any benefit in a capitalist system that values exponential growth above all else.
I don’t think I’m alone in admitting that my spiritual self has been reduced to a shadow. And I want that to change.
We are all seeking answers, but we’re not always looking in the right places.
This is such an important question, and it connects, I think, deeply across all aspects of our cultural and civilizational lives at this moment. Humanity could use (and is in the process of) a "great humbling" (to use the name of @DougaldHine's podcast with Ed Gillespie. A reacquaintance with our own animal limitations. In the unfolding ecological crisis, for example, we need to get comfortable with the discomfort of unknowing while also doing the work to engage and heal.
"I gave up my smartphone because I felt like I was becoming spiritually sick. This is the truth. How did I know I was becoming spiritually sick? Because I couldn’t be alone with myself." True, and to realize, bit by bit, there is nothing so wrong with you that you can't be alone with yourself, it's just that there's a lot of profit to be made when you can't stand yourself, when you need to escape yourself, which is the root of all addiction. I've also become very spiritual in the process of my time spent offline journey, and of course if you sit alone with yourself long enough, you're bound to find god (or whatever). We're so lucky to know such things, to seek and find. <3