I think about dissociation a lot because I do it a lot. A few years ago I didn't even know a word for the phenomenon existed. I stumbled across it in some compilation of coherent sentences, looked up the wiki, and boom: oh hey, that's me. Like, most of the time that's really me.
Dissociation is, as I understand it, is a detachment from reality as a reaction to stress, or even just boredom. There are varying degrees, from mild to severe (as the result of trauma generally), but in general, it's choosing to check out for a bit, rather than deal with something that's happening in real space. Or to check out a lot, if you hate your whole life. As an example. For instance.
Have you ever wanted to suspend yourself in time for 10, 50, 100 years just to see what the world is like later? I think about this ALL THE TIME. It occurred to me the other night, in a lovely bout of not sleeping, that dissociation is a poor man's substitute for suspended animation. Right now sucks, so I check out for a few minutes to a few decades and rouse myself to see if the new now is any better. Typically no, for fairly obvious reasons I leave as an exercise for the reader. So in that sense, dissociation is a form of time travel, hoping on a better future. However deeply flawed the logic of it may be.
In the exciting world of weather forecasting, the baseline for a good temperature forecast is "did it beat the climatology forecast?" In other words, was the forecast more accurate than the average temperature on this day for the last 30 years? In this sense, dissociation is the hope that the forecast beats the climatology of one's life so far. Or at least that, on the average, a better moment should be along soon.
Again, this has obvious problems, depending on circumstance. If you're just having a sad day, sure, waiting until tomorrow when you're likely to feel better is a good bet. If you're about to step on a rattlesnake or the car is sliding towards the edge of a cliff, now may not be the moment to bust out your phone and check twitter. Of course, there are many moments that don't seem immediately threatening, just irritating, where checking twitter isn't the ideal solution either, but that's the problem. It's not IMMEDIATELY urgent, so why not put off this annoyance for a few more minutes. Of course, no one here is claiming dissociation is rational.
Dissociation is closely related to procrastination of course, perhaps as a subset? Procrastinating on dealing with immediate reality. Procrastinaton, of course, ultimately being an existential problem (note how I say, of course, to skip lightly by arguing this point). That problem being" I'm going to die someday. I'd like to feel like I got some things accomplished before then. How good do I feel about how I spend my time? Most people seem to be banking on having some time to cram a late-night study session in before the big one hits if TV binging trends are any indication. Procrastination is the refusal to admit time is a currency and we apes have precious little to spend and probably shouldn't just fling it carelessly about. Procrastination is a delusional relationship to mortality.
Not to paint dissociation as evil. As a human being, you can't get away from an emotional response to stress, and dissociation as a way of taking a moment to collect one's self is probably not a bad thing. It's when one stretches that moment out indefinitely that problems might start to creep in. Or, worse yet, when one even procrastinates on recognizing the problem, because defining the problem might drag one relentlessly and ruthlessly into dealing with it.
My dissociation of choice is gaming. At 40, I'm ready to call my relationship with games "addictive" although that is a separate issue to some degree. I have a peculiar mixture of ADD and OCD (not-too-seriously self-diagnosed) that leaves me relentlessly focused on chasing ever-changing pixels around a screen. I receive video game tasks like labors from mighty Zeus himself. I'll just play this one more level before bed. One more chapter before I write those emails. One more play through of a 40-hour campaign before I clean up the apartment. Just 10 short years of exploring an MMO before I take a hard look at my career. Just 5 short lifetimes before I get around to figuring out what these impatient, and frankly increasingly rude, lights at the end of the tunnel keep sending me back to learn.
But games have been, and frankly remain, a form of time travel for me. It doesn't help that almost every game on the market these days is consciously addictive and loaded with feature bloat to keep me playing as long as possible. Every game wants to be the only game in my life. I'm at the point now where "120+ hours of gameplay!" sounds less like a feature and more like a death sentence. But it beats dealing with my life, so hail mighty Zeus and Mercury, lord of games, how can I bring you glory with these pixels today?
Dissociative gaming has really been a form of time travel for me. Every time I finish a game I look around bleary-eyed, wondering what the world outside looks like now. Like Scrooge throwing his window opening wide shouting, "Boy, what day is it?" Except it's mid-March, Tiny Tim is dead, dead, dead and it really is too late to deal with the problems of late-December. This humble blog post is written in just such a moment.
I don't emerge entirely unchanged, of course. The body has gotten flabbier with lack of care. and I do get the occasional moment of inspiration and beauty from game worlds. And I want to say maybe those moments are not worth the hours of repetitive button-mashing that lies in between them, but as I've been realizing, those timeless, beautiful moments of dissociation are probably, in fact, the point.
I figure once I solve the need to dissociate, the gaming addiction will largely solve itself. On an emotional level, it just needs to feel more worthwhile to deal with shit and try to build a better life than to keep jumping forward in $60, 120+ hour increments hoping my life has solved itself. Intellectually I know that's true. But the inner child who, astride my inner animal, rules my mind like a petty, perpetually-distracted tyrant doesn't buy it yet.
How I find inspiration in the world as it is, is a different blog post of course. If I can stop jumping recklessly through time I'll let you know how it goes.
