In his recent essay ‘The Waters of Lethe Flow From Our Digital Streams,’ L.M. Sacasas compares our digital environment, our online reality, to the river Lethe in Greek mythology, the underworld river which induces forgetfulness in everyone who drinks from it. Sacasas arrived at this metaphor from pondering that all-too-common experience of picking up our phone (or whichever digital device), seeking and intending only a few minutes’ worth of distraction, only to end up quickly forgetting what we set out to do, getting lost in the infinite stream of content.
It is, essentially, about one of the many effects of information overload, and is not a particularly novel observation about our experiences with the Internet. But the reframing in terms of Greek mythology makes it more appealing and lends it gravitas. The Greeks certainly knew how to ponder important questions and afflictions, and they had remedies to offer and prescribe.
I have been in a very unfocused state for a while now, my mind battered by winds of inattention too strong for my feeble mental foundations. I could use some ancient Greek prescription for this ailment. In his essay, Sacasas identifies one such remedy: “a practice of anamnesis”. Wikipedia tells me this means something particular in Platonic philosophy, and I usually would have taken this as a cue to dive down a rabbit hole of Web pages to build a scholarly understanding of this alluring Greek term. But that, I recognize now, is to indulge again in drinking from the waters of Lethe.
So I will just take an irrational leap of faith and—gasp—assume that the idea of anamnesis is something in the same spirit as that currently fashionable idea of returning to “first principles”. One medicine for distraction and digital forgetfulness, according to this ethos, is a deliberate, mindful focus on one’s core values, and this mindfulness would help illuminate the path of true priorities, bringing clarity to an otherwise chaotic existence. (And there are practices that aid mindfulness, such as writing, like this.)
It sounds serious and Greek-like enough. I hope it helps.