What Musashi Can Teach Us About Social Media and Isolation

Or living each day as if a sword fight will find us before evening

Miyamoto Musashi killing a giant creature, from The Book of Five Rings

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Social media is an ill-fitting name for a technology that lies at the root of a crisis of social isolation.

It seems that the more social media someone uses, the greater the sense of isolation the user feels.¹ Diehard social media users are more likely than occasional users to say, “I feel left out,” or “I feel isolated from others even when I am near them,” or, most telling of all, “I feel that people are around me but not with me.” My sense is that the problem is not interpersonal isolation, or the separation of self from others. It is existential isolation, or the separation of self from the world.² It is thought that existential isolation is caused by pondering matters of life and death. Actually, in the case of social media, it might be that refusing to ponder these matters that is the problem.

How are we to make sense of this? One of my favorite novels is Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, based on the life of Miyamoto Musashi – a kensei, or sword saint – who lived during seventeenth-century Japan. Let us take a scene from Musashi as a counter point to existential isolation.

Eiji describes the precise moment when four samurai encircled Musashi with swords drawn. “At the same instant, Musashi’s sword, with the twang of a bowstring, pierced the air, and a thunderous shout filled the empty space. The battle cry came not from his mouth alone but from his whole body… Musashi felt vibrantly alive. His blood seemed about to burst from every pore… One against four, yet Musashi felt himself at no great disadvantage. He was conscious of a swelling in his veins. At times like this, the idea of dying is said to assert itself in the mind, but Musashi had no thought of death. At the same time, he felt no certainty of his ability to win… The wind seemed to blow through his head, cooling his brain, clearing his vision… Swords, men, earth, sky – everything seemed to have frozen solid.”³

We are left with many questions. What is it about social media that can deepen the abyss between self and universe? What can social media users learn from Musashi? It may be that shutting social media off is only the first step to recovery, and that Musashi went beyond confronting the separation of self and universe – my hunch is that he united them.  

What then is social media? It is of interest that we jerk our hand back from the black widow in our shoe but not from Reddit or Meta when it appears on our laptop screen. Why do we not feel fear when our eyes fall on social media despite the dreaded isolation that follows? Why do we put up with it? A few reasons beg to be put into words.  

One: it may be that our blood and our brains still think it is twenty-thousand years ago, so our modern threats are too new for us to have generated fears of them⁴. Enough people had to be bit by spiders and then sweat, vomit, or even die, for our fear of them to be written into our instinctual scripts. Using social media, then, is like the earliest bipedal apes placing black widows on their arms and draping pit vipers around their necks.

Two: my intuition is that social media is designed to function as a poison and at the same time appear as the antidote. It is the perfect recurring revenue model. Social media increases isolation, and then the isolated seek social media; they cast their souls in the digitized void, and social media converts the charred remains of these souls into profit. It is designed to turn both barrels of our ancestry against us by promising primally intoxicating “likes” and “influence.” So it is that when a brief moment of reflection breaks through the matrix and the user feels the first icy stab of aloneness in the vastness of the cosmos – when the “curtain of reality flutters open, and we catch a glimpse of the machinery backstage” – social media is ready to offer a surge of dopamine for the brain and a bit of opium for the soul.

Three: the record breaking growth of social media companies is even more extraordinary when we consider that the hyper-activity of social media use is in truth a hyper-passivity.⁵ Likes, comments, and virtue signaling are not real action. They are passive inaction. In this way social media fools the self into fancying itself a God in its chair. What use is a self or a universe when one is God? Sadly, the user is neither God-in-the-computer nor God-on-the-computer. Once the user crawls down the digital rabbit hole, the self begins to wail and gnash its teeth while the universe stands in silence until the Day of Judgement. The more time spent in the social world, the more the real world grows malevolent, terrifying and separate.

What then? Where does Musashi fit into all of this? Musashi was not hyper-active – he was hyper-reflective. It is a welcome paradox that the solution to the crisis of isolation is solitude.

We have an idea of his thoughts from The Book of Five Rings which he wrote in the 1640’s.⁶ Musashi advised us to “Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world.” The social media user, on the other hand, attempts to warp the universe into their own image – and in doing so knows neither self nor universe. Musashi sought “to keep the face neither lowered nor raised, nor leaning nor frowning; the keep the eyes unperturbed, the forehead without wrinkles...” The face of the social media user, on the other hand, is not so Zen; glazed or irate, yes, but not poised for sword play. Musashi knew “10,000 things from a single thing.” The social media user, on the other hand, does not know one real thing from 10,000 virtual things.

Musashi believed that the pursuit of perfection was a virtue. To experience even one moment of perfection was to lay eyes on the absolute perfection of the universe. It was, in other words, to be one with the universe.⁷ One way he did this was to live each day as if a fight would find him before sunset. Now what if Musashi used Meta for two hours per day? Would he be more or less ready for a fight? Would he still feel “no certainty of his ability to win…” and at the exact same time have “no thought of death”? Let us take this mode of mind and place it in our hands: he was not certain he would win; losing meant death; and yet he had no thought of death. What then? Is this not perfection?

Irvin D. Yalom defines existential isolation as the “unbridgeable gulf between… the individual and the world.” Did Musashi not bridge the gulf between self and universe? Is it possible that pursuing perfect acceptance of the world around us in each second of life is a solution to existential isolation? It may be worth the attempt, at any rate.  

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1. U.S. Surgeon General Advisory on “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

2. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

3. Yoshikawa, Eiji and Charles S Terry. Musashi. 1st U.S. ed. New York, Kodansha, 2012. Page 212.

4. Buss, David M. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. 2nd ed. Boston, Pearson/A and B, 2004

5. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burn-Out Society. Stanford University Press, 2015. Page 22 for inspiration.

6. Miyamoto, Musashi and William Scott Wilson. The Book of Five Rings. Boston, Shambhala Publications, 2012.

7. French, Shannon E. The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.