Sunday, October 01, 2006
Input:
- Limited social interaction
- Social isolation (not even other people around even if not interacting with them)
- Watching a lot of movies
- Majority of interpersonal communication via instant messaging
You become an observer of life rather than a participant in it. Rather than movies being a representation of life, suddenly life is a movie and you are a character in it. The events of the movie can actually affect your state of being. You may be called upon to participate in the unfolding of events even in some menial way. You can't simply observe and this irritates you. You are no longer invisible. You notice that in your isolation your mental constructs of reality have begun to diverge from reality itself. This dissociation serves to amplify the perceptual effects. You realize that the movies seem more real than life does and that you can become more engrossed in them than in real life and that you do not feel the disconnect between the fantasy realities than you do in the real realities. When you watch movies, you learn about people, but because you are a non-entity observer, you do not apply any of these lessons to yourself or to the people in the reality movie. They don't operate the same and they kind of freak you out because they know you are there and they think of you just like any other character. Suddenly you are overwhelmed by self-awareness as you realize that you have flesh and are an entity. You wish to return to your non-existence and observation because honest to god real experience is too much for you.
That describes my night at the grocery store... and most other days and nights of my life.