The Sickness

Donald Trump is Gaslighting America #2016

The year is #2016 on my Instagram, and I could only think to share, “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America,” published to Teen Vogue on December 10th, 2016. The date is too small, the headline too big, too relevant to the cold, hard fact that an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good, shot her in the head and called her a “fucking bitch,” and the Trump administration is denying what we have seen with our own eyes. In an onslaught of lies, this fascist regime holds true to one promise sworn in the face of the force they dare call God: If we fail to comply with a federal agent, they can shoot us in the head, and according to The White House, that’s not murder.

“Gaslighting” (2016) sits there on my feed, looking like it makes perfect sense with today’s date. For me, that screenshot is a portal back to the moment my life blew up with the push of a button. Within hours of clicking “publish,” there were so many notifications on my Twitter account, the feed was unable to load. That same overload was pummeling my nervous system. White hot fluorescent lighting went shooting out of the screen, into my chest. I felt like I was chugging neon paint cut with glitter, and not to mention the fact that I was on Tucker Carlson’s show two weeks later.

TL,DR; I was profiled in The New York Times, canceled by Buzzfeed, and, eventually quit the internet and ran off to the mountains to join a cult. The pandemic hit just as I’d officially had my fill of being perceived on Twitter, and on September 5th, 2020, I wrote this newsletter one last time, and logged out for more than four years.

All of a sudden, I was no one in the middle of nowhere, and I started sitting with ayahuasca like that was my next career path. After sitting in ceremony over a hundred times, I turned to medicine in desperation, “Mother Ayahuasca, please, help me find peace, I will do anything,” and she said, “Oh my fucking God, stop drinking ayahuasca.” It occurred to me that I had to see life as if it was as meaningful as sitting with with the medicine, and, over the past three years, that realization has turned my life into a psychedelic experience. Through this new way of seeing, being alive is changing me, through symbols and signs, in dreams and the clouds, I am learning the depths of true inner peace. And then somehow, as the next chapter in that story, I’m supposed to go back online.

It just so happens that my resolution to Practice Piano Every Day is coinciding with the rueful conviction that I must return to social media. As I build a small team for myself and my comedy show, it has come to my attention that I have to make short-form videos online. This is painful for me having been personally exploded by the internet, and even more so after earning a sense of deep meditative peace alone in the mountains, which seems to be the quintessential opposite of Being Online.

In choosing to be alive, to connect to the universe through my relationship with nature, I’ve finally found the way of being I longed for while trapped in the rabbit hole of my social media self. I swear, I’m out in the mountains, at sunrise and sunset, praying, Mother Earth, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu… owl, mantis, rattlesnake, and whoever’s listening: Are you really sure you guys want me to go back online? At this point, my own parents have said, as if in intervention, “Lauren, we believe you have what it takes to make it as a writer and a comedian, but, we’ve talked about it, and, we really think you should get back on social media.”

If you’re wondering what it’s like to return to the internet after hundreds of hours of psychedelics and natural solitude, I can report without hesitation: I hate it and it sucks. The endless scroll of social media and the unchecked rise of AI, stealing our energy, our water, our ability to use our hearts and minds, our very capacity to sit and think, our brains corroding, our power over our lives ripped out of our fingertips, it’s enough to make anyone question “God.” Is the thing known by ten thousand names — The Field, Great Spirit, infinite intelligence — there in the doom scroll? Whatever you believe gives life meaning, or if you bother with the word “God,” it seems to me that our life force is being stolen from us, and I’m no expert in AI, but I’m certain that the one thing these tech overlords have underestimated is that the most powerful supercomputer on the planet is our nervous system.

I have been compelled to heal my nervous system through a series of spiritual practices, in recent years, with committed focus on Wu Ming qi gong. I have spent years meditating for hours everyday, learning how to calm my body, and to use my mind in alignment with the imagination of the planet. I think this is probably much easier for people to learn who have not been electrocuted by the internet, though, I am grateful to have had my brain zapped in this way. Looking back at #2016, it seems to me that a freak accident blasted me off my phone right before the whole world was hooked up for two to seventeen hours a day. The benefit is that, not only am I not addicted to my phone, looking at my screen literally makes me sick.

A few nights ago, I watched The Matrix, wondering how prophetic the Wachowski sisters really were, and, folks, they actually say “AI.” Morpheus tells Neo that we created AI, a singular consciousness that spawned the race of robots feasting off human energy… and isn’t that what’s happening to all of us for all those hours we are scrolling our lives away?

When we discuss the threat of AI, the problem is the prompt. What recklessness would unfold if you programmed a robot to preserve its own existence above all else? The greater problem is the prompt the humans are trained on. What if your ultimate priority was the accumulation of wealth? We all know that our energy is being stolen from us to profit billionaires who could easily lift billions out of poverty. One hopes the truth of No Spoon applies to the machines of social media and artificial intelligence as well as the edict of their quarterly profit margin, that we might realize the evolutionary consciousness of super-intelligence is accessed by harmonizing our energy in alignment with Mother Earth as a species in evolution.

As I am forced back into Being Online, my finger is drawn to the algorithm, puppet strings pulling me in with flashing lights and buzzing alerts, the dings and bells of getting attention. More and more, I am drawn back into the slot machine we’re all destined to lose if we play long enough. I have to stop myself from clicking the app in the space that was empty of pull just a few months ago. And then, one day, I used my phone so much, I felt like I got punched in the stomach.

Last week, on the precipice of a stress spiral after dinner, I wanted to zone out and do some wholesome, old-fashioned binge watching instead of raw-dogging my dread. I popped open Netflix and hit submit on some random show that looked to be about rich ladies fighting over cocktails called Members Only: Palm Beach. I was prepared for some dumb background noise to shoving popcorn in my face, and then it turned out that these rich ladies were being mean to each other about going to Mar-A-Lago. I shut it off, refusing to stomach the social machinations surrounding galas for fascism, and decided to get sick using my phone instead. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, I must of have been on Instagram, on and off, for at least a half hour, maybe even forty-five minutes, and I could barely get up. I set my phone down beside me, and was stuck there, rendered dumb, hopeless, senseless, somewhat literally powerless, having had my energy sucked up into the clawing vacuum of the robot’s mouth.

As best I can, when I feel like shit, I practice qi gong, and, ideally, I remember to practice before I become permanently clenched. Dropping deeper into the cushions, it seemed impossible to stand up and meditate, to try and be still while there was radioactive poison riding out its toxic half life in my veins. Instead, I tore myself out of the quicksand of the cushions, went over to the keyboard, and played “slow and easy Piano Man” — the two-finger iteration that I have been learning for two weeks now. I played through a few times, by memory, and it was slow and shitty, but not too bad to remember how to feel my body, to relax, to breathe, to let the power of life flow through my soul again, to feel real and really present with the stuff they’re stealing through our screens.

Pancake Brain is a (free) newsletter in which award-winning & -losing writer Lauren Duca tries to change her brain by practicing piano. Fresh & hot on Fridays, and please do share wherever you do your best doomscrolling.