Reflections on Mortality.
Today I was walking home, and I was listening to music. Earphones in.
I have Spotify on free mode. I hate it. It’s designed to addict and irritate. A cycle which is, no doubt, aimed at provoking you into paying for the premium. It’s a roulette of songs, on which you gamble your seven-per-hour skips. All I wanted was to listen to Avenged Sevenfold’s ‘Buried Alive’. So, I pressed on it… and I had to skip three or four songs before it played. At this point I had only just opened the wretched app.
The damned thing is a dopamine farm. I scrapped the premium version, in hopes that I would get bored of the free version, and stop using it altogether. Instead, I stuck around, squeezing out the dopamine from the free version instead. I feel like Homer in that Simpsons episode where he ends up sucking beer out of the carpet. I allowed myself to leave the dopamine farm, but found myself coming back for the carrots.
Enough metaphors.
Here’s what happened.
I was walking along, happily merrily.
I needed to cross a street on my block, as the pavement ended where I was. So I was in the process of stepping out onto the road, and had already started shifting my bodyweight to perform this movement. That was when I turned my head on a swivel and noticed the small white car. It was thundering towards me.
I lurched back. It shot past me like it was attempting the land speed record.
Sometimes when something like that happens, you take a while to register it.
That’s not what happened. I knew how stupid that was, and I registered it immediately. And I was hit with the sinking feeling in no time at all.
I was distracted. It would have been solely my fault. I was blasting heavy metal. While I’d love to blame Spotify, my inattentiveness was on me.
I suppose I’m hung up on the what-ifs. I’m hung up on the mental image of my parents’ faces, being told their son has been turned into a fine mist. Poor driver, too. I was so far over, they must have thought they were going to kill me, that’s for sure.
Frankly, I’m really shaken. Not in any bodily manner, but it keeps replaying in my head. The profound stupidity of it. A healthy twenty two year old need not yet pass from this veil of tears. All the time and money invested on my upbringing; it could have been wasted in a moment. The human machine that is I, scrapped needlessly in an accident of moronic proportions. I would have been turned into human sashimi.
In the minutes proceeding this near-miss, I tried to conjure up thoughts of comfort. I was fine- untouched- but my mind was whirring with the aforementioned what-ifs and whataboutisms.
Seth MacFarlane’s Wikipedia page is what came to mind. I read it a good few years back. It speaks of his experience on September 11th, 2001.
MacFarlane was scheduled as a passenger on one of the planes involved in 9/11 - a hangover lead to him missing the flight. It’s probably the only time in history someone was glad to turn up late to the airport. He did an interview with TVShowsOnDVD.com, a now-defunct news site. The subject was brought up.
We gamble with our lives every day- This is what I’m telling myself in order to remain sane. As Chris Cornell sings in You Know My Name, ‘Life is gone with just a spin of the wheel’. The problem with today’s incident, is that my stupidity is the thing that nearly got me pulverised. You can mitigate some risks more than others. You ought to mitigate the mitigatable ones. You ought to know the malaise of a near miss.
Transport is a risk. I used to have panic attacks as a passenger on trains and in cars. On a road trip, I would look at my friends dozing off in the back seat, and I would think, ‘how can you sleep at a time like this? We’re in a metal death machine thundering down a strip of asphalt!’. I could picture one slip of a steering wheel, and a forensics team picking up pieces of our limbs along a dual carriageway. I got over that phobia through simple exposure to being in cars, and slowly learning to relax more and more. Now I sleep during most car journeys.
…Well, the ones in which I’m a passenger, anyway.
I’m sure today’s near-miss will follow a similar course. I will eventually stop having flashbacks to that moment, I will stop jolting in my seat when I think of what the impact could have been. I will stop imagining the disintegration of my spinal cord. Or worse, my brain… which is what happens when a blancmange of an organ meets a fast-moving automobile.
Sorry for the imagery… moving on.
Allow me to frame a point of my own.
I like to run, and people mess with me when I’m running. I had a van man chuck a liquid in my eyes last year. A few weeks ago, an SUV thundered past me and unloaded a white substance, possibly flour, all over me. I’ve been laughed at, sworn at, spat at, and lunged at. I’ve developed something of a thick skin, when shit goes down on a run, I barely flinch. The spike of adrenaline has been replaced by honest-to-God bemusement. I can get over those things because other people did them to me. I feel no guilt. Today’s event affected me because the responsibility would have been all mine. I would have been responsible for a list of things, from my own death or maiming, the trauma of the driver, all the way down to the dent in the car’s bumper.
All I can do now is bloody learn from it.
I said a long time ago, and keep saying, that I will cease using earphones. I’ve been lectured by family and internet strangers alike about how often I use them. It’s got the potential to damage your hearing and it takes your attention away from your surroundings. Bottom line. If we’re being more sophisticated in our troubleshooting, I would also stipulate that it contributes to an antisocial and atomised society. When your ears are clasped between two speakers, you’re not-for example- open to talking to the nice old lady on the bus. Missing out on such aspects of community cohesion is bad for you and thy neighbour.
No more headphones for me, man. I’m saying sayonara to Spotify too.
I’ve got a nice big boombox at home, I can always buy some more CDs and enjoy them in my room. Just like God intended.
As we enter the addiction age, which I spoke about in a previous blog post, people say increasingly stupid things to justify their Sloth and nihilistic greed. Durmonski (2023) comes to some similar conclusions. An article in Psychology Today affirms ‘research that shows a rise in narcissism’ (Riggio, 2017). Cultures plagued by selfish and short-term thinking are on a road to ruin. It starts with the little things, like unobservant people walking out in front of cars… cough cough.
In the long-term, I’m concerned that we’re going to end up like the people in the Matrix pods. But in the short- to medium-term, my concern is that I nearly died today, in the fashion that many others have. May Sydney Sweeny rest in peace. I’m not trying to bring levity to her tragic death. I’m also not saying to ditch your smartphone, I’m not telling you to delete your social media apps- I’m not going to. However, I avoid having social media apps on my phone (apart from genuine communication apps), and I am increasingly making an effort to leave my devices and screens out of my bedroom and places where they might prove a distraction or temptation. To be candid, I’m writing this on my laptop…in my bedroom… but I shouldn’t be for reasons of sleep hygiene. Further from this, cutting earbuds/headphones out of my life should eliminate at least one distraction when I’m out and about.
This blog post was a self-administered therapeutic activity for me. I hope you found some value in this too.
Civilisation had existed for thousands of years before instant entertainment came along. It won’t hurt us to detach ourselves from these apps to which we have become slaves.
It’s time we learn how to look around once in a while. We might see something important.
Sincerely,
Jed.
