Greenfield Recorder – As I See It: Here's Your Brain on Garbage

Over the past three generations, our consumption has shifted from material objects of comfort (like shoes and cars) to mental events of pleasure (like entertainment such as television, the Internet, social media). Similarly, our waste production has shifted from physical waste (like pizza boxes or food waste) to mental waste (like the Super Bowl).

For our physical waste, we use trash cans. For our mental waste, we use our brain as a trash can. It is into our brain that the waste comes and it is from our brain that the mental waste is thrown out. It is very likely that the last episode of a television show that you watched with gusto has already been emptied from your mind, your brain acting as a trash can.

In a typical mental garbage process, your television is on but your mind is not. Without the full activation or participation of your mind, your brain has become a garbage can that does nothing but process mental garbage all day, all year, all life. So much garbage is flowing in and out of our brains that we are not even aware most of the time that our brains are actively functioning as (mental) garbage cans. Every day and every moment of American life, when so much garbage is coming at us, our brains must throw it away instantly or it would explode with so much of what it receives. In our multimedia age, most of us as consumers spend most of our days throwing away our mental garbage, actively functioning as garbage cans.

Mental waste is, technically speaking, a universal phenomenon. Even cavemen had useless waste to throw away, simply by repetition, and today even the poorest tribes have human waste that qualifies as mental waste. The amount we throw away as useless depends on how much of our consumption is made up of useless objects.

As the world leader in entertainment production, we are naturally the world leader in mental waste consumption. But we engage in entertainment only after we have finished our real lives, that is, our work and household chores for the day, week, or season. As a totally useless and frivolous element of our real lives, entertainment, especially mass-produced and mass-marketed entertainment, is always the best candidate for disposal. In fact, entertainment is designed to be instantly discarded: if we could still remember yesterday's entertaining events today, no new entertainment could be consumed today. In love, the opposite of entertainment, we seek a single entertainment that lasts our entire life; in entertainment, every encounter is just the next instant trash can. If someone argues that entertainment is important, we are forced to ask: why, then, do we instantly discard it?

In the caveman's day, what the caveman dismissed from his mind as useless was very little, for most of the knowledge he acquired in his daily life was useful for his survival. If he observed that a falling stone killed his companion, for example, he filed that knowledge (falling stone-death) away in his mind as useful. Every day he learned something new that enriched his life in nature and in caveman society. As one might suppose, little in his life, either physical or mental, was dismissed as useless knowledge.

As civilization advances, entertainments unrelated to survival or necessity multiply, and slowly but surely our mental waste increases. The easier life becomes, the more mental waste is produced, consumed, and discarded, first by kings and lords, and then by the common people.

Let us fast-forward through history and come directly to our era of mass production in America, the most waste-producing nation in history. What we get is an endless stream of stimulants that never rests or stops; such attacks, essentially nothing after nothing, force us to click and throw, click and throw, like a daily routine that never rests or stops either. Our life in America is nothing but a mental routine of waste processing, day and night: we are all living trash cans.

In America, we want to be happy, and being happy means enjoying perpetual entertainment. We pity a person who has no fun activities planned for the weekend or vacation (what, staying home and reading a book?). Life in America is about perpetual entertainment, and society exists to provide such perpetual entertainment everywhere and at all times. If you are desperate to free yourself from mental waste, as Rousseau and Thoreau did, then you can only find it in places like prisons or monasteries, safe from a wasted life imposed on unsuspecting consumers.

Today, to live in America, your brain must remain empty or emptying. Just like the memory capacity of your computer or cell phone, you must keep your brain empty enough to process the flood of mental garbage. If your brain is filled with human memories, such as your family, church, politics, and other public issues, it cannot appreciate entertainment and other low-quality events at all. That is why the typical American always has an empty brain, ready to receive the next batch of mental garbage.

Like the Romans who wasted their time at the circus, no nation has ever survived by consuming new mental garbage daily. But as an exceptional nation, we would like to think that garbage can enter our brains, but that, miraculously, gold comes out.

Maybe it doesn't matter in the end: the AI ​​will do all the work anyway and we'll become someone else's mental waste.

Jon Huer, a Recorder columnist and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.