Subscribing to a Life

In my dream, I come across a new, improved water bottle being advertised to the hiking crowd. It looks like the basic Nalgene wide-mouth bottle, but the lid is odd. The screw-on cap appears to be made of something like rough graphite or sandpaper with a metal center. I asked why the lid is so configured, and the seller replied, “It is your internet connection.” I am stunned and ask, “Why would I need that out in the wilderness?” He replies that everyone wants to be connected wherever they happen to be.

I continue pressing him about the features of the bottle and ask, “Does it hold water, and can I drink from it?” He replies, “Of course, but you have to subscribe to our service to unlock it.” My jaw drops. When I wake up, I wonder if we are getting to the point we will have to pay a monthly subscription fee to live. Maybe when we pop out of the womb, we will be given a PIN number. Maybe the doctor or midwife will immediately implant a computer chip in the soft spot on top of our heads.

I know I am an old fogey and did not grow up under the influence of current technology, but I have read many studies on the negative effects our digital world inflicts on our mental health. In conversations with high school students, they seem to agree social media isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but everyone is doing it to feel included, to feel validated. They go on to say it also provokes anxiety and depression. So why would anyone subscribe?

We all seek connections to make sense of our lives, to feel safe and supported. And it is important to have loved ones in our circle of relationships. Satisfying this need takes work but is very simple and does not require batteries. Then why do we seem to need more evidence of our existence through various forms of communication like social media?

On a psychological level, we have a lot of approval issues and we continually seek validation for existing. Ego has an insatiable thirst to prove itself valuable even though we have no such inherent independent existence. But we subscribe to the belief that we have a ‘unique’ identity that separates us from each other and the world at large. We want to be acknowledged for it—and we pay dearly for this ideal through our suffering.

Of course, we do not have to get enmired in this belief. I sit by a river and watch the water flow—free of the confines of a water bottle. It tells me everything I need to know about existence: an unfettered stream of interconnected being. What I pay for this awareness, my subscription fee, is through cooperating with the cascade of loving-kindness flowing from my heart. As William Stafford wrote in the poem, Ask Me:

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.