Perhaps eons ago, I read Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," in which Bradbury wrote of a not-so-futuristic society that filled its existence with superficial familial relations, nonstop background noise, television shows and distraction.
Bradbury's main character (I'm wary of calling him a protagonist) is Guy Montag, a firefighter whose job description in this new society is to burn books. Books, you see, are dangerous in the eyes of the government because they can insight or inspire dangerous action, but first and foremost: facilitate thought. And God knows nothing is more terrifying than people who think.
The society of Guy Montag feared legitimate and undistracted thought more than anything else. And really who can blame it? Being kept alone with nothing more than your thoughts is a terrifying thing. When reading "Fahrenheit 451," it is easy to think that Bradbury's world is a distant, foreign and far fetched rendering of a society that just didn't know the meaning of the term "in moderation,"but just as most dystopian novels unnervingly do, Bradybury's world is becoming a sick reality.
Because I am a *GASP* millennial, I am guilty of always having my cellphone on my person, and most of the time, when I'm doing other things, I have podcasts, documentaries, YouTube videos, you name it playing numbly in the background. I am almost never sitting in complete silence, and why should I? The world and all of its content creators are at my fingertips, and honestly, fending off the cripplingly real and ever approaching tangible concept of loneliness by clicking a video is a much more enticing alternative to sitting alone with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company.
See, there is something that exists somewhere between outright thinking yourself into a bout of depression and filling your ears and attention span with meaningless static that's gone out of style in recent years. I know that there are days when I'm so caught up in checking off empty task after empty task and distracting myself with media, that I may as well as have just been an unfeeling Abby-borg that was just put on this planet to meet empty requirements to keep meaninglessly existing.
And I know that I'm not alone in this.
Our society has morphed, albeit slowly and unwittingly, into a world of distraction where I can't even remember the last time I did something in my free time that I wholeheartedly enjoyed and found stimulating. When modern living is just filled with "have to do's" and utterly mundane "why not do's," (you know, like watching re-runs of the Kardashians) you will one day find that you're now just like all of those office types you always said you were never going to be like when you were a young, idealistic millennial age teen.
We shouldn't run from the thoughts that swirl around our heads during the rare times that we let them run free. Embracing the scary realities that we often run from in this modern form of socially accepted escapism denies people the ability to cope with the abject truths that make life at times depressing, terrifying, inspiring, motivational and damn worth it.
"Fahrenheit 451" is named such because that is supposedly the temperature at which books burn. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know for sure that our world at least is nearing an irreversible era in which the outright rejection of true self deliberation and discussion will be heartbreakingly common. Perhaps us being more aware of the problem can help curb some of the horrible consequences of our unaddressed fear of silence.
