Perfectly Alone

“Nova” by Burial & Four tet. Peace.

Sometimes I wonder if I was meant for another age, a time before technology became a substitute or transformer of almost all human activities. From the way we transport ourselves, to the way we take care of ourselves, or even the way in which we connect with other human beings,
it’s as if nothing is unmediated by technology anymore.
Before industrialization, before our society broke from tradition to jet into what we call “Modern” times, people probably used weird toothbrushes. But seriously, even my toothbrush is electric. They had to wait for their hair to dry, didn’t have voluminous mascara (were they uglier?)and they had to ride a horse or some shit if they wanted to see their friends, which, I don’t know about you, would make me reconsider who I would put that much energy into hanging out with.
While we believe technology to make our lives easier, faster, I think we often overlook the consequences of how such easiness and fastness is shaping who we are as human beings. At this point in time, I think our concepts of "nature” and “authenticity” are suffering from an age of distraction—an age where we cannot take our time, focus, because the world pulls our attention in a thousand different ways at once. We have adapted to being bombarded with advertisements, being surrounded by strangers, while listening to our headphones [on a bike] and watching for traffic. This is “natural”.

Consequently, we fascinate ourselves with similarly stimulating things such as video games, electric toothbrushes and television instead of more focused and productive activities such as painting, writing poetry or spending necessary time with loved ones (while waiting for our hair to dry). Even spending time on Facebook, and this blog, are recreating something authentic— that is, my personality— through technology. However, the image you all have of me is constrained by the way in which the technology available limits my possibilities for expression (it has been said that “the commands of the applications we use command us”). In that sense, you don’t really know me, but you know what is fabricated about me through the Timeline format of statuses and posts and the pages available for me to “like”. All technology acts in this way, by distancing us from the true subject or activity in order to make life “easier”. What becomes of this is a more superficial world where what is easy and fast always win, even our connections to other people.
Back in a time where one could not simply hide behind a screen, a text message, our parents had to nervously call their crush’s house phone and establish a relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Jones before even speaking to their son or daughter. While we feel as though technologies such as phones and the internet are making us all more connected, we must also see the way in which these technologies alter the genuineness of relationships and alter our sense of timing. In an era of instant “friending” and instant everything, nothing seems to mean as much as it used to (when you had to ride a horse or some shit to a friend’s house). We are, in this technological age, perfectly alone,
content or oblivious to have technology replace other forms of authentic fulfillment.

“Fish don’t know they’re in water”

~Derek Sivers