I miss you fellow humans.
Sitting across from me on the subway. The grocery. The corner store. Walking down the street. Navigating traffic. Navigating steps. Standing. Sitting. Alone. In groups. Two, three, four, more.
Lost in ‘the box’. Technically a rectangle.
Flashing light and color. Fingers tap, tap. Everywhere but right here. Right now.
Lovely actual reality directly in front of you. Side to side. Up & down and all around you.
The box isn’t real. Not really. Quick hits. Unsatisfactory.
Used to be called ‘the idiot box’ once upon a time. We mocked the naysayers. ‘I’m learning about the world. Staying in touch. Information. Informative. Informed, I am.’
This box that’s a rectangle. The world at our fingertips. All of human knowledge. All of the time. What’s wrong with that?
Except that we’re not knee deep in great minds and great leaders. No rise of the philosopher class, studying Seneca and reading the collected works of Chaucer on their daily commute. No boundless upgrade to the public discourse or elevation of the body politic.
We’re getting better and better at turning the red dot into a blue dot for 50,000 points! A new world record! ‘No one has collected more snazzle bogs than I have! I’m king of the world!’
The greatest minds of our generation engaging with and promulgating the digital equivalent of anonymous scrawling on a bathroom stall. The world collectively dumber and angrier two hundred and eighty characters at a time.
Shallowness, vanity, vapidness. Choose your favorite deadly sin. All proudly displayed for the click, the swipe, the heart emoji, the ‘like’. Everywhere the all seeing, all knowing lines of code gently pushing us this way and that. The quick hits of ‘happy happy’ aren’t really free at all. The beast must be fed.
I’m not speaking from some lofty hilltop. I don’t judge you fellow humans. I live in an expansive house of glass. Though there are stones all around I will not be the one to throw them.
The unpleasant truth is that the world will be increasingly differentiated between those able to manage and control their digital flow, and those who aren’t. Those who unplug and those who don’t.
Those who allow themselves to be bored and allow themselves to have original thoughts will control the lives of those who don’t. Everywhere people are tapping and swiping and engaged with the trivial and the meaningless. Slowly dying by a thousand tiny hits of dopamine. The ability to feel true joy slowly sucked away.
Billion dollar corporations aiming their algorithms at your brain every minute of every day. Brilliant minds handsomely paid to suck every last bit of attention from you.
But we must all fight on. We must fight the good fight fellow humans. We must take back our minds from those who would control us. We must think for ourselves. We must inoculate ourselves daily with the slow and the methodical. We must rebuild our focus and reclaim our attention.
It won’t be easy. The box calls out. Undeniable pleasures, but transitory.
The real world can be scary. It can be awful and painful and horrible. It can also be quite wonderful. Most of the time actually, if you’ll just look up.
I miss you fellow humans. Won’t you join me in the real world? Let’s see it together.