It is frightening to look at what we are as a nation today when you look back at what we used to be. We have become a selfish society that is glued to our technology and fueled by narcissism driven social media that has created the illusion that we are more important than anyone around us. WE have become self-involved and so incredibly focused on ourselves that the idea of selflessness is almost a foreign idea. I'm not writing this out of self driven hypocrisy, but more-so that I, too, am part of the problem.
The root of this problem, to me, is the growing presence of technology within our daily lives, and of course our social media. Being able to contact anyone, post anything, and immediately speak out to a worldwide audience has created a false sense of who we are, how we spend our time, and what is important. In the past, we weren't so connected to other parts of the world and didn't have the option to stream movies, scroll through twitter, or read Buzzfeed listicles to pass our time. Instead, social interaction, exercise, writing, and other important developmental activities filled our days and left us to be more productive individuals. We had to leave our homes to socialize, go outside and around town to pass time with friends, and actually speak to each other as human beings without any small screens to help us ignore each other. Instead, now we can just lay our days away to Netflix and chill and avoid real human contact. We stay on our phones at dinner and with friends, we only go out if we can get a good Instagram photo to show we did something, and we only live for ourselves.
Our technology has done great things for worldwide development and interconnection, but it has also drained the spirit of our youth and left us with shells of what was once the prime of our lives. Spending our days avoiding social contact and only living through our accounts has destroyed a culture that was once proud of itself and the others who lived in it as well. We have lost imagination and the sense of selflessness that once made us better people. You know there's a problem when a major television station has a day where they shut off their network for a few hours just to encourage kids to go outside and play. Our children today are not what they used to be, and to me, that is almost heartbreaking.
So please, can we all just log off our computers, leave our cellphones at home for a few hours, and actually go out into the world without having to look at it with the veil of a small screen?
