we’ve been bamboozled.
we’re being controlled
by a bunch of greedy suits
and the electronic idols
they dangle in front of us.
it’s preposterous.
we spend twelve hours a day with media. twelve. that’s half of our daily allotment of life. not to mention that we’re subjected to over 5,000 ads and brand names during that time. preposterous.
are we but dimwitted mules trudging toward the carrot? habitually consuming virtual sustenance? looking for love and happiness and validation where it can never be found? living carefully curated online personas that are sleek and smooth—not messy and innocuous like our real ones.
it’s quite peculiar. this information age. feeding us mostly useless and false intelligence with plenty of illusions. of control. of intimacy. of knowledge.
it’s misleading, and we know it. the willed spontaneity, the feigned self-deprecating talk, the incessant need to justify oneself and one’s actions to the [virtual] world. (note: the very definition of virtual is “almost or nearly,” with its antonyms being actual, authentic, real.)
but it makes no difference whether or not our lives are as perfect beyond the screen as they are on it. what matters is how it makes us feel.
how it’s grasping our throats and tightening ever so gently. sneakily. so we won’t realize we’re asphyxiated until it’s too late.
don’t get me wrong. i have a lot of love for many aspects of [social] media. but, as a whole, it leaves me feeling somehow deflated. so many lovely and varied possible existences presenting themselves on a neverending reel. subtly planting the seed that i don’t have enough. am not enough.
and we’re trapped. in our minds and our devices. and we covet and resent and devalue.
we’re being conditioned.
to consume. to create patterns of habits and artificial reactions that allow us to be controlled. by the suits who build the things from which we need to escape.
but we’re in luck, because i know the antidote for the social-media-addicted-sick-man. it’s a little avocation called being alive. reading a real book with real pages. going to a real coffee shop made of real bricks and drinking real coffee with real friends. loafing through some real woods full of real trees producing real living, breathing oxygen.
revolt. do something. anything. real.