Books will outlive us, we killed our future
Recently, I've been feeling defeated by the direction this world has been inevitably taking. Everything is happening everywhere all at once. Huge, serious events are playing out raw before our eyes to see. I dug through my home library to find some books to read (instead of corroding my brain with internet bog) and found this impressive stash. Impressive not in its' size, rather the lifetime of the books it contains. These are classics, some of these issues are from the '30s! Somehow, these slim volumes of paper and word survived more than millions of people unfortunately didn't. Significant pages in the chronicles of humanity. It struck me just how close history is to us, still. At the end of the day – The Past is, well, only the past. Rising moons and setting suns, days dissolving into the unforgiving stream of time and plunging ahead into the uncertain future. Time has been healing and recycling water for millenia, yet now – we stopped it. The weakest link among Earth's beings, the brittle homo sapiens, often outlived even by turtles or clams. We – as a collective, destroyed our home.
And yet, nobody seems to care? Like a singular organism, we decided conjointly not to mind this situation at all! Sometimes, I feel like a dormant cancer cell in this comatose carcass of a society. This might sound excessive, but I just can't help it. I feel like I'm going crazy in this modern world. We are a mass of speeding sparks, caught up with seemingly individual problems that are in truth – universal and common. Unfortunately, we don't group into a joint hale of anger, a joint fight for change, rather – we burn out quickly and hit the charred remains of what once was. The is no soil to bloom from. Young people, the spring of our kind, prefer to cut themselves out of this collapsing system, seeking shelter in the mesmerising pit of the digital world. Hell, I do too! We encrypt countless hours of thoughts and unconducted conversations into simple phrases, words, letters, symbols – ilysm. cu. k. We conceal out fears with the veil of irony, we distance ourselves from words, the ones that might just hold significance. Baring oneself in the world of finicky, faux oversharing is either completely horrifying or seen as a performance.
So, it's no surprise that gradually, more and more people start getting addicted to artificial comfort. We live in a time when interntional communication is the easiest thing in the world, yet every single person I talk to seems to feel the lonelinest they've ever been. I don't understand chatting with a hollow imitation of a human, moreso getting attached and romantically involved with a bot like that – but I do understand loneliness. It is a plague, widespread and harvesting the rotting fruits of it's labor. On the path of finding companionship, many hit the coloquial wall and plunge deep into the murky waters of pessimism or depression. Sometimes, this perfect, artificial friend might just be the lifebelt that saves them from death. But we need to remember that what it takes from us is not worth the reassuring message sent by a perfectly-curated digital girlfriend/boyfriend, that is nothing more than a system of zeroes and ones. The energy, the water and the time it steals from the world, may just take away your future experience.
The modern human has grown lazy. People don't want to create, they want to consume. They don't want to think for themselves, but to be given specifically curated, boxed ideas they can pick and choose from. They don't want to try, because what is the point, really? Perhaps it's not that they don't want to, maybe they are simply frightened. Our world is falling apart right before our very eyes, our languages dissolve and shorten, we lose our words, we don't read. Wether it's me, you – or perhaps it isn't, if you got this far – we will all suffer to the effects of – what exactly? The greed of the rich? The centuries of progress in the name of bettering humanity, that inevitably brought us nothing but emptiness and doom? Is there even a Future for us to look forward to, instead of blankly drilling our eyes into the blue light, and into the smooth black surface of the screen?
Just who is gazing back at you, from the dark tile of this digital mirror when you shut it off?
*I just finished writing this on my phone after a long day. I'm tired, English is not my main language, there might be mistakes, I don't care. Also, I'm sick and just needed to get this off my chest. Peace xx
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