During the last three generations, the focus of our consumption changed from primarily material things for comfort (like shoes and cars) to predominantly “mental” events for pleasure (such as entertainment like TV, internet, social media). So did our trash production, from physical trash (like pizza boxes or food trash) to “mental trash” (like the Super Bowl).

For our physical trash, we use trash cans. For our mental trash, we use our brains for trash cans. It is our brains into which the trash comes and it is our brains from which mental trash is thrown out. Very likely, the last episode of a TV show you excitedly watched has already been “trashed out” of your mind, with your brain working as the trash can.

In a typical process of mental trash, your TV is turned on but your mind isn’t. Without your mind’s full activation or participation, your brain has become a trash can that merely processes mental trash all day, all year, all life. So much trash is processed in and out of our brains that we are not even aware most of the time that our brain is working busily as a (mental) trash can.

Every day and every moment in American life, as so much trash comes our way, our brains must throw it out instantly, or they would explode with so much of what they receive. In our multimedia era, most of us as consumers spend most of our days just throwing out our mind-waste, actively working as trash cans.

Mental trash is, technically speaking, a universal phenomenon. Even the proverbial cavemen had something to throw out as useless, in sheer repetition, and today even the poorest tribes have some form of human waste that qualifies as mental trash. How much we throw out as useless depends on how much of our consumption is made up of “useless” items.

As the world leader in entertainment production, naturally, we lead the world in mental-trash consumption. But we engage in entertainment only after our real living — such as work and chores — has been done for the day or week or season. As an entirely irrelevant and frivolous part of our real life, entertainment — especially the mass-produced and mass-marketed kind — is always the best candidate for throwing out.

In fact, entertainment is designed to be thrown out instantly: If we remembered yesterday’s entertaining events still vividly today, why, no new entertainment could possibly be consumed today. In love, the opposite of entertainment, we search for just one to last our lifetime; in entertainment, each encounter is just the next instant trash. If anybody argues that entertainment is important, we are compelled to ask: Why, then, do we throw it out instantly?

In the days of the cave, what the caveman threw out of his mind as useless was very little, as most knowledge he obtained in his daily life was useful for his survival. If he observed that a falling rock killed his companion, for example, he tucked that knowledge (“rock-fall-kill”) away in his mind as “useful.” Every day he learned something new that added to his life in nature and the cave society. Little in his life, both physical and mental, as we can surmise, was thrown away as useless knowledge.

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With greater civilization comes more amusement unrelated to survival or necessity, and ever slowly but surely, our mental trash increases. The easier the living gets, the more mental trash is produced, consumed and thrown out — at first by kings and lords and later by commoners.

Speed up the whole range of history and come straight to our own mass production time in America, history’s most waste-producing nation today. What we get is an endless stream of stimulants that never rests or ends; such attacks, essentially nothing after nothing, force us to click and throw away, click and throw away, as a daily routine that never rests or ends, either.

Our life in America is just a mental trash processing routine, day and night: We are all living trash cans.

In America we want to be happy, and to be happy is to enjoy perpetual amusement. We pity a person who has no “fun” events planned for the weekend or holiday (“What, stay home and read a book?”). Life in America is to experience perpetual amusement and society exists to provide such perpetual amusement — everywhere and all the time. 

If you desperately seek freedom from mental trash, as Rousseau and Thoreau did, you can find it only in places like prisons or monasteries, safely protected from such a wasted life forced upon unsuspecting consumers.

Today, to live in America, your brain must stay empty or in the process of being emptied. Just like the memory capacity on your computer or cellphone, you must keep your brain empty enough in order to process the flood of mental trash. If your brain is full of human memories, say, about your family or church, or politics and other public issues, your brain cannot enjoy entertainment and other trashy events at all. That’s why a typical American is always empty-brained, ready for the next batch of mental trash.

Like the Romans who wasted their days at the circus, no nation has ever survived just consuming new mental trash as their daily routine preoccupation. But as an “exceptional” nation, we would like to think that garbage can go into our brain but, miraculously, gold comes out of it.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter in the end: AI will do all the work anyway and we will become somebody else’s mental trash.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.