In 2003, the worldwide phenomenon
of social media was brought to the light of public eye. After meddling with
email, instant messaging boards, and the beginning stages of text messaging, society
took a new leap (or some might say stumble) and a new tool of self-expression,
Myspace, was created. A year later, Facebook lassoed our attention spans, and a
year after that, Twitter. Eventually, a few years later, Instagram took hold,
shortly followed by Snapchat.
While social media is most
definitely a valuable tool to interact in many ways, it seems to unfortunately
bring out, not only the worst in many of us, but also the most childish. It can
often be used for pictures and quick statements. Initially, most of us were sold
on the idea that it would be a 21st century way of interacting with
distant friends or relatives. Now somehow it mirrors a loneliness and lack of quality
thought that I might have never known ran so rampantly within our peers. It
serves as a panic room for our most
exaggerated fears, a mediator for groups in disagreement to jab at one another,
and it allows people who might never meet to provide either discouragement or affirmation
of ideas. Within its first fifteen years of public access, it has become the
center of many of our paradigms. A stop-gap for our own loneliness, lack of
voice in social situations, and in many cases, a platform to illustrate our own
mental misfiring’s publicly.
………….
When a bachelor cooks a meal he cooks for himself. When he
shops he shops for one, and when he eats he gets his fill, assuming he has the
time to finish his food. He may walk through the grocery store and find himself
stricken by sadness at the family in the aisle beside him with the screaming
children and the overburdened parents. Maybe the parents are well-off. They buy
a mixture of healthy name brand foods and late-night junk food for the
teenagers staying up late fiddling their fingers on an X-Box control pad—maybe
they are pulling out the food stamps and divvying out calories evenly. Packages
of block cheddar cheese, frozen apple juice, fat free milk, a tub of peanut
butter, a couple cartons of eggs, and a box of Ramen Noodles might occupy the
space around the child squatting in the grocery cart.
The
bachelor may find company with his friends. On a better night, he may find
himself drunken on the dance floor with a girl he hardly knows who shares the
same quiet yearning and emptiness as he. They may hope both of their negatives
can converge to form a positive. They shuffle into a group of young people once
regarded as “the future” of our species. Every adult had once warned them about
the sharpness of a cold reality, which they now dull by gluttonous alcohol
intake and slurred conversations about social justice and the nature of ethics.
“Adulthood” used to have a
grandiosity attached to it. It used to sparkle and glisten with the naivety and
excitement only observed through the blissful eyes of the inexperienced. Like
a Christmas present under a tree to a child, wrapped neatly are the contents of
independence, freedom, and self-reliance. As a child you believe that once
unpackaged it would most certainly be the key to a revelation of purpose and
calling—right? Instead it was five days of hitting snooze on the alarm clock,
sitting in traffic, getting stuck at the same intersections, cursing your
career choice (or lack-of), all leading to a reward of mindless indulgences
disguised as “youth”, which scientifically relate to an animalistic need for
spreading your DNA in hopes to achieve some sort of physical immortality in the
form of genetics.
Is this all?
The bachelor may never feel sadness
when he sees the family beside him. He may only quickly glance over, only to
continue his life the way it was as he entered the store. It is of course very
likely he may go home, stare at his Facebook feed, engage in a dead-end debate
with someone who disagrees on how we interpret the 2nd amendment,
and find himself in a technology fueled half sleep. It lasts seven hours, until
the alarm breaks the slide show of random imagery telling stories of seemingly
miscellaneous interactions and events that either happened, will happen, did not
happen, or happened in a fashion entirely different than he had perceived in
the time of its occurrence.
As the word “dream” drifts through
his mind, his day dream ends, and his work continues. He sits in traffic on the
way home and the dream lives on. It’s a dream of a new road, a new scene, a new
city, a new apartment, a new girlfriend. Maybe a dream of the purity he once
felt as a child staring at that present under the tree. It seems now as though
when he had opened the seemingly innocent gift, the powers it granted him
overtook him. His lack of preparation for the responsibility that comes with
that big word “adulthood” seem to place him consistently behind the eight ball
in his life, and what may now be “youth” and was once “childhood” will soon be
“elderly” and eventually “deceased.”
Is this all?
If he were to have felt sadness
while sitting in this grocery line it could have been either a sadness for the
parents or an envy at their life. In all likelihood whichever it was, it was
probably a little bit of both. He probably hasn’t the capacity of on-the-spot
sensitivity to recognize what he feels. If he feels indifferent to his
surroundings in the monotony of the moment, he suffers from the same ailment as
if he were to feel sadness. Oddly enough, however, if he could suddenly uncover
a hidden capability of reading another’s mind he might see that he is not alone
in this ailment. What seems like jealousy, indifference, contentment, or
sadness is actually rampant amongst the fellow shoppers. He might see that the
family beside him is struggling financially, or maybe that they have so much
money they’ve lost touch with necessity and recognition of each other. He might
see that not only the father and mother feel this, but so do the children. He
might turn and see that this is common with the customer in front of him,
behind him, the one walking out the door, and even the cashier.
“Is this all?” They might all be
asking. He might realize that it is not only he who desires more, but everyone
he encounters.
The truth is none of us have ever
or will meet someone who has it all figured out. The beauty of the human state
is that we have such variety in temperament, feeling, personality,
circumstance, and potential decisions. We are all within a spectrum of
imagining and reimagining ourselves, how we view each-other, and how we view
the world around us. We are in a constant state of coming and going, our
society is evolving at a faster rate with each passing decade than it ever has
prior, and every decision we make has deep implications for the future of us
all and the generations to come.
Somehow we require so little of our
interactions with each-other. For some reason far beyond my understanding, we
have an entirely too low standard for those who’s views we align with our own.
And for those whom we disagree, we meet on a hypothetical never-ending battlefield
of social media and major networks. We gallop on the backs of bandwidth,
wielding keyboards and shallow acronyms as our weapons of choice. But it is not
our divisive opinions that are slaughtered in the process, instead it is our wit,
integrity, and our responsibility as adults to lead our brothers and sisters of
the human race, as well as the generations of keyboard wielding warriors to
come.
Most importantly, however, we have
very little requirements in the extent to which we achieve our max capacity as
highly intelligent and capable beings on an individual level. We instead stoop
our intellect to a level just above Chimpanzee. We exist just enough to pay the
bills or buy into (or simply purchase) an excess of attractively packaged mindlessness
that contributes nothing to either our evolutionary or spiritual character. Our
society, science, and technology moves at such a pace that it could develop an
ability to harness its own intelligence before we ever give ourselves the
chance to recognize the potential of our own. Many of us have no intent to
provide any contributions to our own well-being, let alone our families’, fellow
countrymen’s, our species’, or planets. We dwell within our own contentment,
malcontent, or envy so deeply that our thoughts and actions are immovably
shallow.
This is not all.
It is not some peculiar and
unfamiliar challenge we face. It is a problem of having a glass capable of
holding eight ounces of water that is rarely filled past four ounces. It is not
a problem of capacity, it is a problem of substance. Many of us have no problem
talking, though nearly all of us portray ourselves as disinterested in
consciously listening. It seems we poor the glass out before we can fill it up.
While it could be simply labeled as a lack of thought put into individual actions,
it is more a lack of quality thought, which is not insurmountable. We all
desire more from ourselves, whether we recognize it or not. When we do not strive
to grasp the reigns of our own pursuit, we find ourselves offering our inadequacies
as reflections of ourselves in interaction.
Often, I thought this was solely a
product of poor parenting. It is not. I could claim it is a lack of education,
but I would still likely be wrong. And while those are most definitely
contributing factors, improvements in those avenues and others like them only
assist in preparation for the contents of the neatly wrapped gifts of “adulthood”.
Adulthood is an achievement, much like old age. independence, freedom, and
self-reliance are absolutely something to be excited about within your
adolescence. But they are in themselves gifts earned through experiences who
wield power, requiring responsibility, accountability, rational thinking,
humility, and truth. Without these accompanying traits we are all bound to the
slavery of our own pathl
essness and insufficiency.
When we get to the point of being
an adult, we must require a base level of attentiveness and self-awareness from
ourselves and each-other. After all, as a child, you aspire to have those
characteristics in your back pocket as an adult. We are not victims of social
media. It is not the inventions fault that we are disinterested in interacting
with each other in an adultlike and responsible manner. Every one of us is
capable of contributing more to the pot of human interaction than we put forth,
and it is the pursuit of fulfilling those capabilities that will drive us away
from the strife and divisiveness we encounter on these platforms. The gaps in
our own mental, physical, and spiritual development are waiting to be filled by
our desire to listen, learn, and grow—not to be exemplified by hatred and
discouragement towards our brothers and sisters. We are capable of more. We are
called for more.
We use the word “dream” to describe
aspirations, but our aspirations for our own lives are far from measly dreams.
They are not abstract and filled with miscellaneous content outside of our
ability to guide. They are not theoretical and frail, able to be crumbled by
circumstance or obstacles. They are attainable, they exist in all of us, and it
is one of the great and exciting opportunities of life that we be granted the “gift”
of pursuit. Find your capacity and exceed it. Fill your cup. It deserves all
eight ounces of your being, not four. You aren’t chained to your job, you aren’t
chained to your apartment, and the life you live now can ALWAYS be enhanced. As
long as you are alive you can dream. As long as you can dream you can achieve.
No comments:
Post a Comment