It is astounding to me just how insidiously powerful is the pull of convenience. The screen calls to us 24/7, pulling us away from the world, drawing addled gaze to drool over a miniature 5G theater of light and sound. The promise of the internet has been transformed into a drug of convenience, powerful and immensely dangerous, even more so because we as yet do not recognize it as such. We sit incapacitated before this god. Not merely a screen, but every electronic gadget that has seeped its way into our lives these past two decades. Small updates to our vehicles, our appliances, our phones. All relieving us from the burden of thinking, but by the same measure relieving us of the gift that distinguishes us from other animals.
We are the animal that thinks, that knows. That simultaneously knows too much, and too little. We know that we exist on the surface of an orb, suspended in a limitless abyss, with no sign that any other like us exists out there or has ever existed before. We are burdened by this knowledge, the lack of an explanation, a burden like no other. We are similarly burdened by the tedious drudgery of day-to-day tasks, but up to now we’ve grunted and grimaced our way through them, and in so doing, we feel contentment. Thinking, yes a burden, is also a muscle, that, when exercised, brings happiness, a feeling of achievement. We are the animal that knows joy through the use of our minds. And not merely the use of our minds for great intellectual achievements, but through its use in our day-to-day lives. Achievement through reason, something that no animal in existence feels.
We are ill at ease, intensely so, because we are surrounded by gadgets that think for us, that perform the intellectual tasks that we should be engaging in every day. We are increasingly surrounded by sensors, blinking lights, bleeps and bloops, that think for us, that treat us like and children and so we act like children, and this makes us feel restless. We sinking into a quicksand, we are being corralled, infantilized, by the slow but steady increase in the number of sensors, alarms, apps, and gadgets that have become a digital, all-knowing nanny, one who will be there until the day we die.
We know something is wrong, but we don’t know what.
The current flows towards increased convenience, and most people appear content to float along, even at the cost of their humanity. Some don’t. Some accept that something is wrong, that the current is gradually picking up speed, and some are beginning to breaststroke it the other way, before we float right off the cliff. Smartphones, cars that increasingly resemble smartphones, screens for all, nothing good can come from this. We have veered far off course as a species. We know that we were made for something great, something more than what we’ve become. We feel it in our bones. We know that we weren’t meant to be mindless consumers hunched over screens while toiling at meaningless jobs, delivering our children to this sham, thresher civilization.
