As I had to go into the city for a blood test, I decided to sit in a café for a little while and answer some comments and write. For a Monday, it seems pretty full which I wasn't expecting, however looking around at the faces the last half hour or more, I can count the number of smiles I have seen on one hand. About half the people are sitting alone with students working on laptops, which is then understandable. But the others are in pairs or small groups, and still no one is smiling. Most in the groups are staring at their phones with a frown on their face, rather than interacting with the people they have "made the effort" to see face to face.
It is depressing.
I am depressed.
Perhaps.
At least by definition of "being pushed or pulled into a lower position" that is the case. But I do not know if I "feel utterly dispirited or dejected", though I am not saying that isn't the case. And this worries me a bit because obviously I write from my own experience, observations and extrapolate it into meaning and understanding of the world, so it is reflected in what and how I write. I fear that at some point, rather than being an encouragement of personal responsibility, change and growth, it becomes too bleak for people to read at all.
What I have always hoped is that despite my rather negative view of the current world, each piece of writing gives a glimmer of potential for the reader to make a change in their own life for the better of themselves and those around them. It doesn't have to be a huge change, because I strongly believe that a bit at a time it is possible to make significant strides toward a better world experience.
Everything we have today has come about through incremental changes, most too slight to even recognise as an influencing factor, that compound against each other to create the current environment. And just like a bank loan where the longer the term the more interest gets paid, this applies to positive movements too. If we invest ourselves today in actions that improve our circumstances, it will have more effect than if we invest ourselves tomorrow. And the more we invest and the more regularly we make contributions, the larger the compounding effects.
Contributions.
I feel that the sense of duty to contribute to society has been largely lost, which I think has many reasons for it. The largest perhaps to point to is the push for the maximisation of the individual, which amongst other things, has driven self-satisfaction over the common good. But I think politics itself has also played a massive role, because rather than each of us having to contribute to survive, we can instead proxy the responsibility to others; politicians, systems, corporations. we don't have to take responsibility, because we are paying others to take action on our behalf. Even when we don't like the actions that they take, we prefer their poor action to our own personal responsibility.
And it isn't just proxying to make our decisions, but we do it for so much of our life now, where our entertainment is delivered too us thoughtlessly through feeds, and even our personalities are created through sets of tools to put something forward that isn't even close to our "authentic" selves. I am not saying that everyone goes as far as the celebrities and socials influencers, but most people are at least partially disconnect themselves from their own reality. And when it comes to how we spend our time, more and more it is becoming a default non-choice of passive consumption.
While sitting here writing, I finally saw some genuine smiles. The first came from a mother happily bouncing her six month old son on her knee and watching him laugh. This attracted the attention of a woman at the next table who smiled at the boy and he smiled back. And then it was a smile I didn't see, but felt, as it was my own watching the interaction. And I think that these types of interactions are vital for a healthy community and a society, because so many aspects of a "good life" are clustered within. The family, friendly strangers, observations of healthy interaction, and for a brief moment at least, the understanding that right now we are sharing this time and space.
Sitting behind screens, streaming content, scrolling feeds, they are not actually shared spaces. The consumption of the environment is alone, the interaction unnatural to the point that it doesn't matter if there is a human or an AI bot on the other side. And in that case, it is a bit like having a conversation with the coffee machine or microwave. It isn't a community or society, it is a one-sided, engineered, self-serving process that doesn't contribute to anyone else.
All the justifications people have to not interact with other humans, are pretty much null and void if we were to go back a little in history, because survival meant there was no other option than to work together. Now though, we do have options to survive as individuals without interacting with others, but what is oft forgotten that others are still required for us to survive. We might have removed our sight of the supply chain, but the supply chain is still necessary. Our "independence" is conditional on invisible people providing for us, meaning we are not independent at all.
I would suspect that like smiles in this café, I can probably count the truly independent in the world on one hand. Maybe two.
Again, I don't know if these reflections help make the readers life better or not, but my hope is that somewhere in these words, people do find hope. Because as bleak as my writing often is, there are always signposts to alternatives, to activity over passivity. We aren't victims, even if we want to believe we are, even when bad things happen to us, even when others label us so. Each of us has an ability to make decisions, even if they seem irrelevant at the time. If we keep making decisions to improve, a bit at a time things can change for the better.
What that future will look like, is still unknown.
But it is predictable.
Taraz
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