What happens when there’s no itch left to scratch?
On rights, and our responsibilities to ourselves
It was nearing 9 PM on the third day of a long week and I was exhausted. My eyes drooped as a I pulled together a halfhearted attempt at a healthy dinner that I hoped would allow me at least some measure of accomplishment in the midst of my loathsome self-pity.
I idly swiped on my phone as the TV droned in the background. A new comedy special on Netflix was building momentum and I chuckled every so often when a joke landed, but I really only caught every couple of words given my distracted attempts to string enough coherent thoughts together to muster a response to an email I had gotten earlier.
I collapsed into bed an hour later after hitting send. Rather than falling straight asleep though, I tossed and turned, kept awake by my sudden and inconveniently timed ability to string coherent thoughts together. What was the point of embracing this unsustainable behavior, I asked myself? I recognized it wasn’t healthy, and yet I dutifully obliged. Why did I feel so uneasy about it, yet unable to take action?
After finally claiming a few hours of sleep, I woke up and found myself enjoying the clarity of a problem illuminated. I thought about how my willing overstimulation from countless streams of information were like an incessant itch that I couldn’t help but to scratch. And we all know how satisfying that is, to finally, just barely, stretch and reach that horrible itch.
But happens, I came to wonder, when there isn’t any itch left to scratch?
Humans are creatures of our own making, built by our own doing. We have no one to blame but ourselves for our habits making a mess of us. And that is exactly what’s happening.
Our fixation on that next best thing, that dull dopamine hit, is a dangerous habit that leaves us frail and vulnerable, ready to cave to just about anything resembling attention-worthiness at a moment’s notice. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have the tools to take charge of our impulses, and need only apply what it is that we already know about being human, about our inherent capacity for power and change, to be better.
The idea that we have we’ve become puppets of stimuli isn’t new at all. Esteemed minds from all corners of academia and the professional world have been ringing the alarm bell for years. Our intellectual slavery to the latest, greatest thing is a widely discussed and generally agreed upon notion. The newest album drop, that crazy reality TV scandal, the fun restaurant that just opened across town. Our mutual state of constant anticipation has us enslaved by the future, never enjoying the present.
And paradoxically, that enslavement to an unsure future jeopardizes its actualization.
It’s a lose-lose of our own making. We’re so rapt in anticipation for the future, that we forget we are in fact creating it for ourselves. So we neglect that doing of the work, the all important task of bringing our own future to life through the action of our present. We’ve created a race to the bottom with no winners, and with nobody but ourselves to blame.
But it hasn’t always been this way. For centuries, great doers have acted rather than waited, gone out and created their own future rather than waiting for it to come to them. I’m speaking of course, about self-determination.
Wait, what?
“Of course”, I say, when referencing an obscure political ideology best known for it’s time in the sun during the aftermath of World War I, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. But in fact, it is.
Although self-determination was popularized in our modern vocabulary by President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, it actually preceded him by several hundred years. Defined one way as “the process by which a person controls their own life” self-determination was a foundational principal of the American and French Revolutions, both of which were largely based upon the philosophies of John Locke, a student of original humanism.
Born in 1632, Locke was an English academic whose early teachings included the works of numerous noted humanists like Petrarch, Erasmus, and their classical forefathers, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plato, among others. Locke’s work posthumously made him the father of modern liberalism, in large part because of his creation of Social Contract theory. In simple terms, this asserted that that government could only exist with consent of the governed, for the purpose of upholding the rights of those governed. One of those rights, and perhaps the most meaningful to the tenants of democracy, was that of self-determination.
As far back as the first half of the seventeenth century, Locke was proposing an ideology of inherent, god given human agency that articulated the rights of humans, individually and collectively, to make choices dictating their own futures. Radical at the time, this new outlook defined the capacity in all humans to make a life for themselves, and the the responsibility to actually go out and do so.
The world would never be the same. Self-determination became a bedrock principal of humanity, used firstly to justify multiple revolutions that led to the creation of the world’s first two elected democracies, later followed by a decoupling of empirical hegemony in the wake of the first global war. Radical thought on notions of the human condition originated in early humanist teachings, which were then repurposed and applied by Locke, a student of those early teachings, which finally laid the foundation for modern humanity, both societal and political.
Fast forward several hundred years, and the world has changed, but the rights and responsibilities inherent in humans, defined within self-determination, have not. It has been a core principal of what it means to be human for hundreds of years. It quite literally lives in the foundation of modern democracy. And yet we ignore its relevance to our everyday lives.
Remember that the next time you start contorting yourself to scratch some digitally inspired itch, that it will just be replaced by another. And then another. And then all of a sudden, after days and weeks and years of building this reliable habit for yourself, just when you think you’ve gotten the pattern down and you’re in control, you’ll numb to it. That always there, reliably omnipresent itch, will just be gone.
But you’ll still be around, needing something to scratch.
Today and everyday, remember that eventually, that itch will go away. Maybe not now, or tomorrow, or next week, but sooner or later, it will fade to a numb nothingness. And remember that if you can’t control the urge to scratch it when it’s there, you likely won’t be able to when it’s gone.
Remember that you have a right to do what you want, but also that you have a responsibility to do what you can. Remember that generations of precedent have been set, and your ability to follow it to create a future of your own making is as inherent as your responsibility to make it happen.
So start ignoring that itch now, while you still can. Your future self will thank you.
Enjoyed this read. So powerful, knowing that the itch goes away on its own. We don’t need to scratch every itch!