Having grown up through an era of pretty sounds and pretty sights that are taken in naturally as every thing of substance should be, how did we fall into the decadent pattern of being stuck inside tiny plastic square cages that are essentially on demand supply of the happiness signals that we are addicted to. Whatever happened to putting on a tape of your favourite album while you made love to your soulmate under the moon or the search for tenderness and the struggle of holding on to it? Where did we lose that path?
As a generation that celebrates disdain and superficiality, what heights of those pursuits have we climbed on to? Have we come far enough that a breadcrumb trail of dopamine is the script for our lives. Are we evolving into a hive mind where the interconnected-ness of the entire world is not through the noble lines of language, music and culture - but rather through the convolutions of copper wires connecting multitudes of worlds inside worlds. Love is a click away and the tick tock of a clock is a little light inside your pocket. The breath of a child is a meme and cities burning is reduced to the number of reactions it gets on the inter-web? Organic growth and the search for goodness is no longer a journey, rather it is an on demand service of pretence and prepared verses spanning the timelines of a fleeting blink of an eye.
Is there a recourse to this sordid narrative? Can we learn to be a species that can still tell a pineapple from an apple by touching them? By smelling them? Are we witnessing the mass genocide of culture in a mass defection of affection and the self righteous suicide of love, and all associated emotions?
Can we listen to a love song without our brains signalling mouths to utter the world ‘cringe’ - where is the fountainhead of this cringe? Are we born into feeling the negative emotions of sacrifice protracted along the continuum of cancellation and the objects that make life worth living diluted to a fleeting glimpse and a narrow view through plastic squares and blinking lights right in front of our drowsy tired eyes? Are we holding things in the palm of hands, such things that should have the enormity of a bright burning star? God forbid I sound like a bitter old world weary man, coming to terms with a fast evolving world - coming to the death of human touching human, soul and body together. As a person who do cherish the accelerated growth of science and the onset of a whole world coming together as one - I do ask the question, is that really the end effect?
Don’t go looking for answers inside this little monologue, they are merely thought-starters for a generation ahead to start asking questions.
