The title of this article isn’t that creative on purpose; it helps drive home the point I wanted to make. That everything we think, know, talk about… it’s no more than a rehash of everything we already know. Here’s a little example I whipped up (but really didn’t, because it’s nothing new, it’s just something that already exists); If  I were to ask you to think of a completely new colour, and then describe it to me, you could only ever tell me that it’s kind of brown, but more rhubarb, and it sounds like cheese falling on a tin roof and it’s kind of that, but it’s also mixed with cornflakes. You could even try to tell me that it’s ‘quijamastatlakka’, but you would have only chose those words or sounds because they are a subset of everything you already know.

So, she asks… what was there before the whole universe existed… what was in that big empty nothing? Well.. the answer isn’t in a science book hidden at the back of the library, or hidden within the ancient teachings of some religion that was made up because they were shit-scared of not having any answers. It’s a trick, it’s not the answer which we need to figure out, it’s the question. It’s why we try to explain things in the same way that we experience life. It’s why we’re so focussed on asking why.

There are things in this universe that we don’t know, like colours that we’ve never seen, or  some concept that I can’t explain to you, because I don’t know what it is. I believe that whatever there is/was/to before the universe is out of our understanding simply because we ask this question in terms of things we know; before, during, after, exist, not-exist.

I’m not saying that we’ll never understand, but I feel like we’re not doing ourselves any favours by asking these questions. Instead, I suggest we just observe more; increase the number of tools we have to relate to things. Once we know Everything (seeing = knowing??), we’ll be able to explain Everything. Until then we’re still going to be wastefully treading water, when we could be just sitting on the edge of the rapidly expanding universe watching the beautiful stars unfold a billion years in the past before our very eyes.

Even though there is a 100% chance that I am wrong, I won’t tell my niece any of this, even though there is also a 100% chance that I am right. Perhaps she’ll figure out something completely new and different and won’t need those decaying jetpack blueprints after all. We can only hope.

For a week, I see what life would be like without logging on to Facebook. I turned off all my notifications, turned away when my girlfriend was logged on watering her virtual plants and avoided all temptation. At the end of the week, I wanted to identify a difference between the useful and non-useful things that social networking provides.

Staying in touch
It turned out that there were only people that I stayed in touch with via Facebook, I didn’t have their current phone number or even email address. I don’t see this as a benefit of Facebook, but a lazy hook that they use to drag you in to their realm. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have someone’s email address, they must have one to use the site in the first place, so the onus of this one is on me.

Direct Contact
The only new direct information that I learnt was that 4 different people like the photos that I take and I also discovered that a youtube video that I thought was a fake, turned out to be… well… a fake. I understand that you have to give to receive, and maybe with a week of zero interaction, I couldn’t expect much, but  I have to ask; is the time invested in priming these responses really worth it? In the short term, I feel like I get some kind of reward from this feedback, but it feels like a can of diet soda; a nice sweet taste, with zero calories in the long run.

Useful information
Just news that my sister has a cold, and my girlfriends brother posted an interesting dance music blog. I was kind of hoping for more, since all week I’ve been teased with my girlfriends cute little snickering as she checked her profile. I had dreams of side-splitting anecdotes and golden nuggets of enlightenment, but there didn’t seem to be any. What I discovered instead, was a desire to add a few more people to my ‘hide’ list, and that I will strive to post less throwaway comments.

The flip side
In my estimations, I must have diverted around 7 facebook hours, or if I stop lying to myself; 15 hours. So what did I do different this week, that I didn’t do for the past few months? I swam a kilometre at my local pool, went for a hygienist appointment at the dentist, took my cat to the vet to get spayed, created 6 new portraits (cat chappell, kara cabados, phineas kibbey, sue kibbey, magnus huckvale, dj bissen), and paid some attention to the neglected Guitar Hero that has been collecting ageing rocker skin cells in the corner.

I didn’t get a feeling of instant reward at first, where were the people telling me that they liked my photos, where was the feeling of satisfaction when taking my cat to a strange place to be poked and prodded? I learnt that the reward system that I’d become reliant on from Facebook was no more real than the rewards that I eventually derived from myself, but the one big difference, is that I was in control, not some external source. That I can live with.

I still agree with my previous post about life being how you choose to waste your time, so if I was to say that choosing to do things other than check my posts at hourly intervals was any better than playing an imaginary guitar based video game, I’d be a hypocrite (oh wait, I am a human… isn’t it in our nature to subscribe to Hypocrisy?). All that happened this week, is that I chose to do something different, and I enjoyed it. In that sense it was a success. If you are so inclined, I suggest that you make up your own life experiments and put them into practice.