We moderns are totally alienated from the human experience is ways we can’t fully comprehend. The commercialization of technology has turned into endless gadgets of convenience, and we’ve developed a mind-crippling addiction to the myriad, cheap drugs of convenience. Every year a new gadget emerges to great fanfare, a new app, a new car equipped agency-destroying features. Why are we attracted to these things, and what are they silently replacing in our lives that makes our lives duller, and why do we feel an inescapable sense of ennui, a sense of doom about the future? The answer is that, in exchange for this narcotic convenience, we’ve forfeited the very thing that makes us human. Are we better off now that 5G towers pepper our cities and rural communities? Has it really brought abundance and happiness the way it was promised? Prices are going up, virtually every community center has closed up shop, and we are left to our hi-speed connections, our unlimited data, the false god that we’ve demanded for decades and who has now arrived. Most people have no idea what is wrong with the world, why everything seems cheaper, why the world of our childhood is gone. The truth is that we’ve allowed it to wilt and die, because we were too preoccupied with the birth of the technological god. We’re more connected than ever, and yet real connection is almost dead. Everyone appears to long for the past, rather than anticipate with excitement the future. This is a disastrous predicament. Through technological advancement we are steadily being re-barbarized. Where can it go from here, other than a further descent? Every in-person institution is being replaced by virtual spaces. The screen is within arms reach from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. An entire generation is being raised and trained to use this technology, nipping in the bud our humanity before it ever begins to blossom. Boredom, that stern molder of character and the spirit, is almost totally dead, because once we feel its uncomfortable sting, we reach for a screen. What kind of individual is created who never feels boredom? What happens to society when millions come of age who have never suffered and developed under it? Almost every young person I see today holds the screen perpetually in their hands, while walking, while driving, in restaurants, movie theaters, while out with friends who also cling to their digital drug, staring at their phone rather than at the people and places that they interact with. How could we ever free ourselves from this prison of convenience, the most dangerous drug we’ve ever developed, except when it is universally seen as the dangerous opiate that it really is? We were not meant to have instant access to the most depraved content imaginable, and yet parents slap phones in their kids’ hands as soon as they’re able to walk. And so they’re frozen in time, with no development possible, no growth of the spirit as they move to adulthood, dimly wondering about the world, but never fully investigating its mysteries because distraction has become a way of life for them. We the human race are cursed, and every new generation will inherit the curse in increasingly potent form. What is the answer to this, what is the way out? Where is the path to an awakening to this danger, and how could we ever reverse course when our economy and social structure is altering itself totally to accommodate this omnipresent drug of convenience? Remove the drug totally and everything would return to a natural order within one generation, but how to even begin? Do we pray for an apocalyptic solar flare to wipe out servers? We’d build it all back again, assuredly. Or are we too far gone to make even the feeblest of movements towards removing this entrenched “progress”? We must reevaluate progress itself, because it has shown itself to be a harvest thorns.
