The Mysterious Mental Side Effects of Traveling into Space
fastcoexist.com
fastcoexist.com
This is pretty corny:
Every year I go to Burning Man. It's the only "real" vacation I really take. I completely detach. No phones, no television, no news from the outside world, and except on days when I have volunteer shifts, no sense of "time".
It's pretty amazing how much you end up detaching from "default" world (which is burner parlance for the world outside of Black Rock City). By a few days in, default just feels impossibly far away, like none of it matters whatsoever, and you are completely detached from it. BRC is on another planet, and Default Planet doesn't matter.
All of the social conventions are different, all of the interactions or somehow (although indescribably, at least for me) different. Everything just feels different somehow.
Do most people get that feeling on "normal" vacations?
Do you think that feeling of difference in interaction and being detached from "default" world has anything to do with the drugs? Either yourself taking them or just the masses of people around you?
I ask, because I noticed that same sense of difference and detachment myself while I lived in a lovely commune after college, but attributed it mostly to heavy drug use.
I used to do cross-country backpacking. The kind where you go on multi-day trips out in the wilderness, well out of the range of any technology (except GPS). What is remarkable about such trips is exactly the type of detachment that the parent describes.
It also gives a profound sense of perspective. You kind of realize how inconsequential your day-to-day concerns are. You know, stuff like trying to not be late to morning stand-ups or vertically centering the text inside some div. You realize how small you are in the grand scheme of things. The forests and rivers and mountains existed long before you were born and they will continue to exist long after you die. In their eyes -- if they had eyes -- you don't matter. You're less than a speck. You're nothing. Then when you lie down in your tent that night and the only thing you can hear are the sounds of nature around you, what happens is that you stop giving a shit about your "default" life.
Several days later, on your way back to civilization, your phone beeps and you realize you're now within range of a cellular tower. Annoyed, you punch in your passcode to silence it. Oh, what's this? Your friend texted you two days ago, inviting you to a house party on Saturday. Better respond real quick so he doesn't think you're ignoring him. And maybe check email while at it, too.
And that's how you get sucked back into bullshit.
I feel like a lot of the heavy drug use in our society comes from the fact that so few people get to get away from the nonsense. The promise of drugs is that your time between "real world mode" and detachment is 15 minutes instead of several days. Of course, most of these drugs have supply-integrity and dosage-certainty issues on account of being illegal, and are unpredictable at best and dangerous at worst. I don't intend to say "drugs are bad", because I think that research into the therapeutic potential of these compounds is 50 years behind where it should be, but most people don't know what they're doing and are using them irresponsibly.
I've noticed that as I've gotten older I'm better at dropping into a detached, almost Zen state... and ignoring the bullshit in "the real world". I've learned that you can't let yourself get sucked into the bullshit, even if you have to be at work. There's an almost sociopathic skill I've cultivated of playing the role without caring. I need to be the subordinate? Fine, I'm a paid actor. I've also worked to cultivate that ability to just focus on the moment, in order to make weekends more useful or effective. A long (15+ mile) bike ride can have that effect, or an outdoor meditation session, or just having a purring cat sleep on top of me. Even if I get just 30 seconds of that detachment, I consider it a success.
When I walked the Camino de Santiago, I felt a major difference in interaction with other people and detached from the rest of the world. At least for me the experience gave me a megadose of a kind of empathy for other people I hadn't often experienced before. This combined with the fact of taking off each day not knowing where you would stay or what your sleeping conditions would be created a powerful sense of detachment from the cares of the "real" world.
Not to offend, but this is typical of HN contributors, to equate a completely mundane Experience with something much deeper and interesting and for no one to call you out on your pap.
Someday once space tourism starts it will be the equivalent of burning man. Until then... Burning man hasn't been cool since it left ocean beach.
As a kid, I went on trail camp. We would hike for about a week, walking about 10 miles a day with a heavy pack. You get into a routine: rise, eat breakfast, take down the tent, pack up, start hiking. Stop for food. Continue hiking, make camp in late afternoon. Go down for the night, start over.
Getting into the routine was easy, and eventually "civilization" felt very, very far away. To the point that you would think about simple things like soft beds and flushing toilets as incomprehensible luxuries.
Getting back into the real world was always more of an adjustment than leaving.
As the majority, maybe their world is actually the "real world"?
For example in India it's (finally) being taken seriously at the highest level. The new prime minister promised 5.2m new lavatories would be built in the first 100 days of his tenure:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matter...
Disassociation can take multiple forms but is the sort of thing where you might look in a mirror and see [what feels like] someone else, think freely of your normal identity (particularly with regards to social identity), or in extreme cases lose any grounding basis for sensory input entirely.
Further reading: sensory deprivation, ketamine.
So, for music festivals, the routine becomes - choose which band you want to listen to, find a good spot in the crowd, relax in the sun, maybe drink a beer. A bit later on repeat for the next band. A bit later on try to find something to eat. You'll go through this routine many many times at a festival, enough that it becomes the new normal.
I regularly do trips to the US to visit Civil War battlefields. You get the same sort of experience. Get in the car, drive to your motel near the battlefield. Check in. Go to the national park, do the exhibitions at the Visitor Centre. Later, visit some of the key battle sites. Come back, find a restaurant. The next day come back, but this time go far a trail hike rather than worrying about the battlefield stuff. Back to hotel, find a restaurant. Next day, get in the car, drive to the next battle site.
The imprtant thing is the routine, specifically I seem to need to go through a cycle 5 - 10 times to get that sense of disconnect from the real world.
Honestly detachment is a good way to put it. I feel detached from my past especially. Like I don't have a set identity. That I'm not the same person as my past,largely delineated by large setting/lifestyle changes.
Honestly, it's sort of a depressing way to look at yourself. Makes it hard to feel like you're actually building on something, working towards things.
Probably the worst case of this was when I first moved to college. About 4 weeks in I actually cried (I can count the times I've cried since teen-hood on one hand so it's rather rare) and I had no idea why at the time. It literally came out of no where. The strange part, I wasn't home sick at all. I had no desire to go home. No, it was closer to an identity crisis. I didn't feel attached to my past self. It was a really empty, lonely feeling.
If anything that i'm saying resonates with you, feel free to reach out =)
For what its worth, I consider myself to have an okay to good mental health. Depends on a lot of circumstances of course.
There is doubtless a term for this kind of dissociative experience. (It probably is 'vacation'; we've just forgotten how to take them properly in the Anglo Saxon world.)
It goes from liftoff to space and back to earth in a handful of minutes, and the enhanced (but real) audio is pretty creepy.
One of the God Helmet scientists (Michael Persinger) hinted at that in one of his lectures I saw, a coincidental synchronicity with the planet's magnetic field, almost akin to the saltiness of our blood being the same as the oceans.
When it turned out nothing quite so dramatic happened to the first space travelers, the idea was dropped, but it's certainly worth considering that less dramatic effects might yet have practical import in the future of human space travel.
(continued here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIJRoj2qwsc
When James May returns to the Earth it's obvious that he's had a very special experience.
"If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything."
Maybe we should be sending politicians into space.