“More more more
How do you like it how do you like it
More more more
How do you like it how do you like it
More more more
How do you like it how do you like it
Oooh how do you like your love
Oooh how do you like your love”
When former porn star and disco singer Andrea True recorded the song, More, More, More by Gregg Diamond, one could argue she was in a prime position to express a few home truths about the culture of satisfaction. In a way, her song is as timely today as it was in the 1970s and speaks with knowing awareness that the fans of want can be flamed with repetitive speech. I wrote more about this in an earlier post if you are interested.
If I had a problem, just one problem, it would be that I wonder too much as I fail to follow orders. I’m just a butthead when it comes to conformity, which is why I struggle with the endless loop and the so-called truths of a writer’s existence. You would think the endless loop would be something like think-write-edit-repeat, but somewhere along the line there came the idea that everyone had to platform, too, had to be something more than just a quietly obsessed creative introvert and instead had to find, burnish, and display an interesting personality.
The problem is, the biggest endless loop of them all is social media. Pushed by that indomitable force, Dopamine, which embarks on endless searches for content, chanting “if I just post here,” “if I just paste there,” like a hog searching for truffles among oak roots, we are victims of our anticipation of good things which almost always exceed reality.
This all reminds me of the time I went to a Tony Robbins event and did the Firewalk before I was deemed a positive thinking washout.
Don’t get me wrong, I chanted myself into oblivion to the heady drum music while stamping on the wet grass, feet freezing, before toddling across the hot coals, attendants pushing from behind like I was in line to see the pope. Truth was, we all knew if I slowed down, I would burn my feet, and some contrary tendency made me pause for just a second to see if I would feel the heat–and I did–right before the attendants hastened me along just ahead of my third degree burns, thus ending my query as to the “magic” of the Firewalk, a “miracle” readily explained by physics.
That night I went home exhausted, dehydrated, hoarse, and unsure. Part of me said I should feel great and admittedly I was caught up in some of the fervor for a time, even gathering a bunch of the ashes from the firewalk as a keepsake in a big cup from Jack-in-the-Box. Years later, I would look at it in wonder at the weird stuff people do when bored in a robust economy.
Midway through Saturday of the event, I’d had enough attempts to bully me into believing in the power of my mind. Trust me, I was already convinced that my mind had power–power enough to decide I never wanted to be self-actualized again. I simply didn’t care anymore, had stopped jumping up and down in my chair, had lost all interest in NLP techniques to “anchor” to sex as my power motivator as if nothing else in the world mattered.
One young woman got so mad at me because I wasn’t rocking out as hard as the rest of our row and they were trying to get Tony to notice them. I pointed out that logically, he was much more likely to notice us with me standing there in skeptical contrast than he would be had I been shaking my wares with the best of ’em. I was simply to exhausted with the whole thing, and like the hamster on the wheel, stopped moving and was flung from the experience.
Years later, something even worse happened: SOCIAL MEDIA. Love it? Hate it? Love it! Hate it! The stuff gets in the way of production yet attracts us over and over again as if things will be different, and we start again, we think we’ve learned something, and we hop on the wheel and go for another spin. It’s that dopamine again, making us want more, more, more, and we can’t stop ourselves. This is the problem with the endless loop.
This all sounds dismal, really dismal, and the more I consider how social media has changed my own life and the lives of my kids, the less I like what I see. Instead of more, more, more, I’m seeking less, less, less in hope of achieving a meaningful minimum.
Tomorrow’s Topic: What is a meaningful minimum and how do you define it for yourself?