Jennifer O’Connell: Why I’m giving up ‘awesome’ for Lent

I’ve given up an embarrassing habit for Lent, one that was wholly unbefitting a woman of 41, or any Irish person of any age. I’ve stopped using the word “awesome”.

I realise I should never have started in the first place, but telling someone who used to work in Silicon Valley that they shouldn’t use the word “awesome” is like telling someone who was a teenager in the 1940s they shouldn’t smoke.

In any case, I’ve stopped now, and not before time. There is virtually no instance of any human in modern society using the word “awesome” when the word “okay” wouldn’t do instead.

“I’ll be home a bit late”. “Awesome.”

“Tap water with that? Awesome.”

“Three Awesome Nacho Recipes That Will Make You Cry.”

A scroll of my Google news feed this morning reveals things currently being hailed as awesome include: a chair, the Dow Jones, loofahs, sweat-proof make-up, a shrimp dish and pictures of Jennifer Aniston leaving the Oscars.

Awesome is the language of the internet, which is the excited babble of oily salesmen hammering on the doorway of your consciousness.

Nothing is ever “quite good” or “momentarily diverting” on the internet, a cyber-souk so crowded with hustlers for your attention that only the most hyperbolic statements have any impact. There, everything is mind-blowing.

Tweets promise to change your life. What happens at number four will stun you. This slideshow of orphaned baby sloths sleeping in trees will leave you so chockablock with big feelings, you’ll burst. And then you won’t believe what happens next.

If the internet was any reflection of the real world – which of course it’s not – we are evolving into a species of permanently incredulous toddlers, careening wildly between emotional states at the swipe of a screen. Click here for outrage. Click here for tears. Click here to spit your coffee out.

On-demand emoting

But all of this on-demand emoting is far from our natural state as a society. Irish people invented the one-finger salute from behind the steering wheel of a car, because a full-on wave seemed too much like a public display of emotion.

In real life, if we want to let people know we like them, we spend most of our time making them feel bad about themselves.

We’re only unfailingly polite to people we can’t stand. Mixed up it may be, but that’s how we evolved – and mostly, it is still true in person. Online, though, we’re just as gushing as the rest of them.

I’ve had enough. I’ve given up all use of the word “awesome”, and also I’m going to spend less time online being awe-struck by pandas or outraged by Donald Trump. Instead, I’m going to focus on rediscovering some actual awe.

Stay with me: I'm not about to go all knitting-your-own placenta here. Awe is just about maintaining a sense of scale. It's about the occasional glimpses the universe offers into why the things that are keeping you awake at 4am – the silly preoccupations, the fears and anxieties – don't actually matter. Awe is why people climb Everest or pay Elon Musk $70 million to take them to the moon.

Scientists call it the “overview effect”: the profound psychological reaction astronauts experience when viewing the Earth from space. But you don’t have to go to Everest or the moon to find that liberating sense of wonder at the insignificance of it all.

Religion used to be a useful way of maintaining the overview effect. When many of us gave up on religion, it left a vacuum which the internet has tried – and mostly failed – to fill. We still need awe, however.

Solid scientific research

There is solid scientific research to show that a sense of awe is one of the things that binds us together as a community, increasing our feelings of connectedness and willingness to help others. Somewhat depressingly, there are research projects under way to find out whether technology like virtual reality could be deployed to help people find awe.

I don't think we should be looking for awe in a screen.

The first time I ran all the way up the hill near my home, there was no magic, no flow, no dopamine high. There was just two feet, pounding painfully on the footpath; a heart hammering inside a rib cage; a throat full of burning air. I wanted, more than anything, to stop. And when I got to the top, I looked back and felt like anything was possible.

If I’d taken a photo and stuck it on the internet, all you would have seen was a typical country road with deep ditches and a slight incline, an off-kilter lamppost, a slash of grey sea on the horizon, a microscopic Hook Head in the distance. Not awesome at all. But to me, in that moment, that view was infinite possibility.

Awe is doing something you thought you’d never manage. It’s a work of art. A view. A baby’s dark eyelash. A moment of realisation that this is all there is. Here’s a suggestion, for Lent or for life. Stop finding everything awesome, and instead try to find awe in unexpected things.

joconnell@irishtimes.com