Surrounded—hemmed in by textbooks, papers, and screens—studying can feel a bit claustrophobic. But feeling trapped can always be worse and eminently more physical. A remedy to study fatigue is just a quick trip to the current event annals to provide, if not solace, perspective. Take the recent murder trial of an American named Sarah Boone. During a dubious game of hide and seek she induced her boyfriend to be zipped up within a suitcase—and there she left him, to die of asphyxiation and panic. Before she left Sarah did take the time to videotape the proceedings, via the universal tool of the Smartphone.
“Sarah…Sarah…I can’t breathe…help!” She videotaped the whole event, believing in her preposterous wisdom that she was teaching him a lesson for what she perceived as his uppity mannerisms earlier in the evening. No child in time-out had it so bad, although tales of cupboard barracks do abound only a generation hence. All this to say, the “it could always be worse” mantra can make our real-world schoolwork struggles a bit more bearable.
Life itself can induce anxiety but at least, unlike the victim, we can still breathe. What a horrific scene: Sarah’s victim, and in a small sense, the whole existence of life. Trapped inside our flesh suits while our mind implies, by nature, that we are looking out and expressing our whims toward an audience—if we can escape first. First there’s the inner treadmill upon which our mind’s eye circulates and self-critiques all in the general direction of producing some actual speech. Indeed, a recent Scientific American article notes that we don’t actually need words to think. Research reveals that “language and thought are, in fact, distinct entities that the brain processes separately. The highest levels of cognition—from novel problem-solving to social reasoning—can proceed without an assist from words or linguistic structures.” So at least we’re not trapped in life by our ability to use words; we can rest assured that the essence of our being is special even if we lack the words to say so. That’s one misery out of the bag, anyway. Yet, to write effectively, we do have to be able to put our genius sentiments into some sort of order. From malleable origins, our mind creates cogent sentences, paragraphs and, finally, a fully fleshed out thesis.
Sometimes we have to exit our mental box to overcome mental barriers and to be relatable to our target audience, because audience matters, be it a professor or a peer. In today’s world each of us knows that at a moment’s notice we can produce an internet video that curates our life’s essence down into a short media-friendly snippet. Prior to Wi-Fi and smartphones this privilege was the realm of a chosen few, largely those who made their nightly appearance on the TV news. Toward the tail end of the TV era, comic strip duo Calvin and Hobbes made some hay from the inchoate potential for us each, as pop artist Andy Warhol predicted, to have a fifteen-minute moment of fame– to be one’s own current events guide and news anchor, in other words.
In an exchange Calvin said “Look, Hobbes, I cut a cardboard box to make it look like a tv screen! See I just hold it up (to frame my face) and it’s just like I’m on TV.”
Hobbes replied: “Wow, your own show!”
Then a bit of late 80s and early 90s reality kicks in; Calvin intones “Too bad I can’t really force my way into millions of homes each day.”
Then, he’s stricken by an epiphany: “On the other hand, no one in this home can turn me off!”
Now, for we who have shared a home with youth, we know that the ability to retain a reprieve from all the hue and cry that emanates from their cell phoneis a real struggle. But the reality is that today’s society is replete with folks who have ever so much to say – and do so online more or less constantly and with reckless abandon. The question in 2024 becomes, “how has the long and winding journey between mental sentiments and verbal emanations been altered?” given that we each are at once an almost constant audience and perpetual purveyor of news, views, and commentary. Have we lost the ability to think independently of the social interactions endemic to social media? What about Rodan’s famous sculpture, The Thinker; where a lone individual citizen sits with his heart and mind presumably affixed on the deepest of thoughts? Has isolation withered on the vine such that, irony of ironies, we’re now trapped in the manner of an actor—like the Jim Carey film The Truman Show—forced to forever be on the stage?.
Attendant to this dilemma is how any of us can unplug from the social media and Wi-Fi realm, whether for a day or a lifetime. But that few of us do suggests that the substance itself, the reality of being in public, connected to the world, itself functions like an addictive substance. And a straitjacket. A suitcase whereupon our very personas become our prison.
Let’s consider the namesake of Hobbes’ human sidekick: Calvin. A full four hundred years ago John Calvin, an earnest theologian, was pondering similar topics: what if we were predestined to basically end up happy or end up sad (consigned to heaven or hell)? Like being tied to our reputation and our appearance in the eyes of others, which if we’re honest we have little control over when compared to our written or musical expression. The visual realm of the internet implies a certain external and coercive control over our fate. Perhaps it’s for this reason there’s so many makeup and workout videos.
Anyway, to Calvin, an all-powerful God who had created the universe and set in motion the lived reality we know of as time, where one thing happens and then another and then another, each in distinct succession in an expansive line over the horizon like an eternity scroll on social media, would, being God, by nature know in advance within his diorama of human drama the outcome of each life, each moment, and each word. He’d know for sure who was going to go viral and whose video would induce groans from whose spouse. Even our thoughts were not truly our own, in this way. It’s a bit like how each side of a political divide assumes that the other has fallen victim to egregious cultural brainwash.
Calvin put it thus: “God is said to set apart those whom he adopts into salvation; it will be highly absurd to say that others acquire by chance or by their own effort what election alone confers on a few. Therefore, whom God passes over, he condemns: and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines for his own children.”
Talk about the ol’ “some of us are born on third base, privileged, and some of us are born on first base” and that whole trope – to Calvin we are literally predestined no matter what we do!
So at least we aren’t living in a Calvinist world, where our fates and therefore our motivation is problematic–we are surely, at least academically, masters of our destiny! Sure, we can feel excessively contained by circumstances or the beliefs of those around us, or our own conflicted worldviews or personal issues, but in the end we are the ones who send in each essay or make each life choice. And hey, our labours are all relative and not life and death: to express ourselves, like a would-be podcast host or another sort of soap-box specimen, is not to pronounce the truth so much as to convey our truth. That’s why exam questions typically incite various possible answers, such as in compare and contrast questions.
No matter how much content we add to the digital morass, we also re-create many of the same limiting worldviews that we might like to imagine our education helps us overcome. Maybe it helps to get back to our nature, our inquisitive essence as beings that wonder. When we think outside the box, like a burrowing owl poking its head out from a knothole in a tree stump, we truly challenge ourselves. Like Law School students diligently trained to acquire a deep understanding of alternate views, we might want to remember that, even when we feel ourselves exiting the tight confines of rigid certainties, within the bright light of day we might actually amount to little more than a distraught toddler who reaches ominously for his backside. Plaintively, s/he wails “Help, the turtle is poking out it its shell!” Because just as every meal meets its fate at the business end of our digestive tract, each idea and belief can also appear as its opposite. Everything gets out in the end, one way or the other.
