I know the old adage that the previous generation was so much better but as I getting older in this day and age I can't help feeling that we took a wrong turn somewhere.
I am not trying to be a Luddite and one of the thing I do appreciate is instant music at the touch of a finger: a portable 152g jukebox .
But as I was sitting out the other day trying to meditate and think of nothing my mind was spinning 1000 miles a minute of all the things
I could Google RIGHT NOW.
I almost found myself wanting a notepad and a pen and for what purpose to look up something and forget it right away (there is another song here somewhere)
Oh yeah Ani DiFranco of course
In a coffee shop in a city
Which is every coffee shop in every city
On a day which is every day
I picked up a magazine
Which is every magazineRead a story, and then forgot it right away
They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time
And it's hard to say if they're happy
But they don't seem much to mind
Same with social media and news.
Outrage here,
outrage there ,
outrage forgotten moving on
to other selected outrage
and I say selected because
the REAL outrages are HIDDEN from us daily.
But all this instant everything feels like an overdose of Huxley's SOMA.
I don't think
our simian Dunbar's brain
can COPE with INSTANT.
By having everything instantaneously
we ACTUALLY LOSE the INSTANT.
We're not there.
We are in the next instant,
the next moment,
the next click,
the next FIX.
I always wanted a Wikipedia or a Google instead of a cumbersome expansive Britannica but somehow the feeling is anticlimactic.
As much as Antoine Roquentin's life of slow boring research felt nauseous in Jean-Paul Sartre's work of the same name: La Nausée, this instant research business is not any better.
Gone are the days of the polymaths:
people with vast knowledge of many subjects after years of arduous studies.
We have OMNIMATHS now:
A bunch of Fucking Know-It-All.
It sure messes up so-called democracy for one thing among many other things. It messes up reality and real science too.
I won't be around long enough to see how it will all go but I'd be curious to know how fucked the world will be in 50 years?
100? 500?
1000 if we last that long.
I certainly do not expect the world to
NOT be fucked up:
extrapolation and entropy being what they are.
Anyway just more muddled thoughts to add to the confusion and the endless data we are fed daily.
Ciao for now.
'The myth that fish have short memories has been debunked by research which showed they respond to training after months in the wild. While it was previously believed that a fish's memory span was only three seconds, scientists now believe they can remember for up to five months.'Jan 7, 2009
ReplyDeleteI remembered reading that some time ago, however, never let debunking popular myths get in the way of a good story ;)
Interesting to think about the concept of 'instant gratification'
Is anything instant? Even if I was hungry given a meal would not gratify me immediately, even though receiving the meal happens in an instant, I still need to do a bit of work to reach satiety.
Same with heroine, still need to smoke it or heat up the spoon, snort....whatever. Nothing is instant. The promise of something is perhaps? Giving the screaming child the toy they want may not necessarily lead to gratification.
The desire is there but will it be satisfying and what actually brings the satisfaction? The toy itself, or the fact that the desire for it was satisfied? Or the gratification of the ego?
Thanks I always cherish and appreciate your input. I knew about the gold fish myth like the carrot myths and so many other known and unknown myths. As for instant grat I do remember my good old days lol acid took some time but cranking crystal meth was as instantaneous as can be :P
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