Okay, I’ll be honest. I’ve rewritten this article about five times. Not because I haven’t thought it was good enough, or anything of the like. More so because I’m extremely passionate about this, and there’s no appropriate way to portray my thoughts, but here it goes, anyway.
We live in an amazing time. We have technology that we never would have dreamed of, medical advancements that allow us to relieve and assist in ways formerly thought impossible. However, we are getting to the point where, in my extremely amateur opinion, that crap is getting a little scary. I don’t mean anything crazy sci-fi or conspiracy like, but more the we may be close to getting in over our heads realm. I mean, look. You’re probably reading this on either your phone or a laptop. Desktops are even becoming archaic, at this point. You have a small device that can combine what would have cost us hundreds of dollars of technology into one phone-calculator-calendar-messenger-computer that you have constantly and can’t function without. That’s freaking insane. Bring someone to the year 2015 from the year 1970 and they wouldn’t be able to function, their brain would just melt;
We’ll put all that aside for a second, I want to talk about how it plays into our society. When was the last time you didn’t have a phone on you for an extended period of time? Not an hour, more like a day or longer. How was that? I hate to say it, but I would pretty much feel anxious the entire time; all of us would. We’ve become almost totally dependent on these things, and it’s awful in my opinion. We are so obsessed with this constant connection that we seriously push the people physically near us away and disconnect.
Our generation, those of us who are roughly 20 to 30 years old have advanced nostalgia, or having the feeling of nostalgia much faster than we should have, because we have experienced so much technological advancement in such a short period of time. We grew up eating Kraft macaroni and watching Disney on VHS tapes. Now, we are walking around in our young adult life in constant contact with people anywhere in the world watching full high definition videos on our phones and buying music instantly. We used to buy cassettes and record songs of the radio (I totally recorded Mambo No. 5 and wore the cassette out). That’s kind of disturbing isn’t it?
Now, we see what is coming: Google Glass, Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift, and all of these augmented and virtual reality devices that promise to take our already pretty cool world and make it even cooler. We are too busy destroying the world we live in, and finding ways to look to technology to give ourselves a façade, staying ignorant to what we have.
On top of these technological advancements changing the very way we interact with our world, we have another obsession that is disconnecting us with our world around us: celebrities. Who is doing what, when and where, what is the new diet or trend dictated by that one woman who is famous for being famous. We would rather pay more attention to people who choose to hold very little weight in the world, and allow ourselves to be immersed in the blissful ignorance that follows. What happened to kids playing spotlight and throwing toilet paper on people’s houses? The epidemic keeps spreading to the younger generations and we’re getting more thoughtless “swag” than we are thinkers and inventors.
Trust me, nothing good comes from watching a ton of TV, especially reality TV. We watch seven burned out ex-celebrities from the 1990s crammed into a luxurious house screw with each other, or we watch totally mental brides ruin their self-image and make their wedding day a hell for everyone involved. I know that one from experience, seriously.
"Bridezillas," season 10, episode 14. Go watch it and see what I dealt with.
But seriously, why do we care? We’re so concerned with watching these shows and burying our faces in our phones that we forgot how to be humans. We don’t do the things we used to; we don’t go sit around and connect. We don’t ask someone how his or her day was and really listen. We are slowly losing what makes us so awesome -- the ability to be sympathetic and be there for people, to connect with each other on a level that text on a screen can never achieve. Ever seen "Wall-E?" Yeah, I get the feeling that isn’t a bad prediction if we don’t turn things around.
“Hey. Send me Candy Crush lives, dammit.”
Ultimately, I just want to see people start to give a crap about what is going on around us. There’s so much negativity in the world, what with the not-awesome economy, high debt, destructive climate change (which is really happening), and a huge list of other things. Why can’t we take like five minutes and go sit out by a fire without phones and just enjoy each other’s company? Or, hell, I don’t know -- maybe do something good for everyone, do some community service and do your part to not strip our ozone any more before the only trees we have to look at are in a museum on Kepler 186-F (go look it up).
If you made it all the way through reading this, thanks for sticking with me. This was originally about celebrities and how we shouldn’t just bury our heads in their lives and we should focus on our own, and I still hit on that. But, honestly, I just want to see the human race make some positive moves to guarantee our continuity. We have a seriously awesome place here, and we haven't seen all of it. So let’s enjoy our time here, and go outside some. Get some genuine, long lasting memories with loved ones. Carve some pumpkins and sit down to eat together now and then, decorate a tree together in a few months, and put the phones down. People are really cool if you actually talk to them.
