Why Microwaves, Fluorescent Light Bulbs, and Digital Music are Evil

We’ve all heard a saying like this one from Alcoholics Anonymous, “You are responsible for the effort, not the result,” or “The ends do not justify the means,” or “Attitude is everything.”

These sayings all point toward the same spiritual principle: How you do things is much more important than what you do.

This is because how you do things is your true “being”. Your being = how you do things.

For instance, I can play some Stevie Ray Vaughan licks on my guitar, but it doesn’t have the same power and beauty as when Stevie played them. Stevie was a master, who had put a lifetime of effort and love into his guitar playing, and I’ve only been playing a few years.

Another area where many men (and some women) are discovering this is dating. An awkward dork can learn the same pickup line, make the same gestures, and speak with the same voice tone as the ‘cool guy,’ but he doesn’t get the girl. The difference is in the vibe. If the awkward dork watches porn and hates his life and isn’t in touch with his heart, that’s how he’s doing life, and the aware woman picks up on that.

A quote from Zen: “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

You can’t separate your inner being in one aspect of life from your inner being in another aspect of life.

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Why Microwaves, Fluorescent Lightbulbs, and Digital Music are Evil:

One day, I cleaned the shit out of my room. Meaning, I cleaned it really well. Paid super attention to details, making sure the post-it notes were lined up exactly parallel to the pencils and everything. When I was done, there was a definite stillness and serenity about the space. A holiness. My room had become a little sanctuary.

It naturally started to lose that perfection, so a couple days later I cleaned the few little deviants back into their proper places so that everything was the way it had been when I was done the first time. But this time, there was no sense of holy stillness. This is because although everything was in the same place, organizing it all had not taken same amount of love and care (and effort) as it had the first time.

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Now you want some chicken nuggets from the freezer. You can bake them (20 minutes) or you can microwave them (2 minutes). You’ve heard the rumors about microwaves killing all the good nutrients and whatnot, but you’ve also heard that it’s just a rumor, so since you can’t decide whether or not it’s true you just say “fuck it” and nuke the fuckers. Two! Zero! Zero! Start! Whhhhuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Chicken done. You eat ‘em, and they’re alright. No complaints.

Or you bake them. Lay out a nice sheet of tinfoil on a baking tray, space the nuggets apart evenly, and bake the fuckers. 20 minutes later, you get them out, put them on a nice plate and eat them. There’s a certain wholesomeness about them that wasn’t present in the microwaved batch. The heat seems to linger longer and they seem more thoroughly… something.

You literally experience the extra patience it took to prepare the nuggets. It’s an affirmation of your worth: “I am a beautiful human who deserves beautiful chicken nuggets prepared with care. I am not a machine that just needs cheap fuel inserted into it.”

Why all the fuss over “homemade” this or that, which advertisers inevitably put on all those CANS in the grocery store? They’re trying to associate their product with that feeling of home-iness, love, care. What’s always the best thing to eat when you’re sick? MOM’s chicken noodle soup. Mom has to make it or it doesn’t count. You know this to be true. It’s not the soup, it’s the love.

Advertisers can try to convince you otherwise, but you can’t cheat God by claiming your product has more love in it when it doesn’t.

Now look at this! Penn and Teller, on their widely acclaimed HBO show (it’s actually Showtime, I’m just saying HBO as a cute little ‘fuck you’ to people who try to sear their logos into my brain… and succeed) devoted an entire episode to the attempt to debunk the superiority of fancy restaurants to Chef Boyardee. Take a look:

How did Russ make this cheap food seem better? He made it beautiful, with tenderness and care. So although the food was originally cheap, the patrons who ate it experienced the care that Russ put into preparing it and the beauty of its presentation. They had also paid “fancy restaurant prices” for it, so they were expecting to enjoy their meals, making it more likely that they will. I love Penn and Teller, but this video proves not that “fancy restaurants are bullshit,” but that the mastery and care of the chefs, decorators, and even the custodians is largely responsible for the difference between shitty and lovely.

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When I first walked into my college dorm room, I flipped on the light. I immediately said “ugh” and turned it back off. The window light was plenty, and the fluorescent light was literally disgusting. You can feel the cheapness of it. It feels like you’re being bathed in plastic. I went ahead and plugged in my floor lamp and switched it on. Much better.

There’s a lot of hype these days about fluorescent lights because they are so damn cheap, last so damn long, and give off the same amount of light as incandescent lights while consuming far less energy. However, compact fluorescent light bulbs contaminate the environment with 30,000 lbs of mercury each year. Not only is the light they produce much “shittier,” but fluorescent lights literally endanger mankind. And I just found out that Congress has already passed a law banning incandescent lights and replacing them with fluorescent. Shit!

“Green” assholes can try to convince you otherwise, but you can’t cheat God by trying to get cheap, shitty light from poisonous vapors instead of using good ol’ Edison’s version.

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Now when you listen to an mp3 of a song, and then listen to that same song on a LP, there’s a certain depth and detail and quality that the mp3 misses. I’ve often noticed that a song will sound much better on the radio than on my ipod, and the only difference I can think of is that the radio station uses LP’s while I use mp3s. Mp3’s can still be great, I don’t think they’re necessarily ‘bad’ for you like fluorescent lights and microwaves, but they definitely seem to sacrifice love for convenience, just like the other two examples.

iTunes can try to convince you otherwise, but you can’t cheat God by compressing the beauty of analog recordings into digital.

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All in all: perhaps microwaves emit harmful radiation or kill good nutrients in food, fluorescent light bulbs are gonna kill us all, and mp3’s aren’t as beautiful. Perhaps not, perhaps it’s all rumors. What is plainly obvious is that something is awry. I think I’ve found the pattern, and it is trying to exchange love for convenience. When we do that, we may be succeed, but always end up fucking ourselves extra hard in the long run (and not enjoying the short run as much in the meantime).

I suppose the moral of the story is, do everything with absolute love and care.

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Written by Mike Elias, in the voice of ‘the uppity self help blogger who is sometimes angry and is not Steve Pavlina but might be Ariel of youaretrulyloved.com but probably not’.