America the Distracted

Okay, so I was thinking, there’s this… wait, that’s my phone.  Okay, my team’s up two nothing in the first, good.  But anyway, I was- the door.  Who’s at the door?  Oh no, it’s the Lawn Rangers again.  How many times do you have to shout obscenities in Mandarin out the window before they get the message?  I’ll just duck in here until they’re… Dang, my phone again.  Oh, it’s just a video of a Panda playing a banjo.

Where was I?

Here’s the thing: Is it just me, or have we lost like 75% of our attention span?  I mean, you can’t even have a conversation without the other person donning that faraway gaze two minutes in.  My last attempt went something like this:

Me:  Hey, what’s up?

Them:  Nuthin.

Me:  Nothing huh?

Them:  Yep.

Me:  Really? Nothing at all?

Them:  Have you seen that video of that Panda playing a banjo?

I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone focus on anything for more than a few minutes, unless it was binge-watching the latest flavor-of-the-week Netflix release, or immersed in some video game.  Engage in conversation? Pooh-pooh the thought.  Having a barbeque?  Better collect the phones at the door.  Trying to organize a neighborhood clean-up day at the local park?  Good luck with that.  Unless there’s Wi-Fi.

No, we have – through conditioning, apathy, or some combination of the two – pretty much lost our ability to think about one thing for more than fifteen minutes, twenty tops.  Yet we are captivated by the most trivial, inane, and immaterial of shiny objects; it’s like junk food for the brain. 

A series of tornados tears through the Midwest sucking a few hundred people – and a handful of tractors - up into the vortex, but that’s soon forgotten when some reality show chucklehead tearfully reveals she was forced to eat lima beans as a child.  Life-changing events are occurring all around us, often right on our doorstep, but social media is abuzz over a couple of celebrity’s Twitter feud.

Some have suggested that we’re being manipulated into focusing on some things, to distract us from others.  And, they’re probably right - to some degree.  But, we can only ascribe so much blame to others when we are ultimately responsible for the choices we make in where to invest our time, energy, and emotions.

So, that’s it.  In closing, I’d just like to say- WHOA! A METAPOD JUST SPAWNED LIKE 600 YARDS FROM HERE!  Gotta run!

 

Stay focused out there.

A World Not of Our Making

It seems many of us these days have found ourselves in a world which is increasingly alien.  There are strange doings afoot, bizarre and unsettling to our nature.  You can hear it in the voices of our seniors, an unspoken longing for a time which bears little resemblance to present day.  We see it in the eyes of our young parents, once wide-eyed and energetic, now praying for a bolt from the blue to knock them silly, as the peace and solitude of a hospital bed is preferable to their exhausting existence.  We plod through our endless, unfulfilling workday.  At marketplaces, and parks, and places of worship we congregate, occasionally catching another’s gaze, each wondering how much humanity the other has retained. We read the day’s headlines wondering if the world has lost its collective minds.   We stare blankly off into nothingness, wondering how, and when, things went off the rails. 

We increasingly escape into the relative comfort and predictability of some alternate existence, of video games, and virtual reality, and a cyber-verse of avatars where we can be whatever and whomever we like. 

We populate a world in which most of us have ever diminishing amounts of control, however much we want to believe otherwise.  We rage against a machine which draws evermore power from our efforts; we light candle after candle, and still curse the darkness.  We watch, perplexed, as yet another familiar hallmark of our existence spirals off into the void.

Some have become acclimated to this new world quite well actually.  They have prospered and flourished and found their niche.  But this is not a tale of boot-strapping, and adapting, and seeing the glass as perpetually half-full.  Rather this is a testament to those who awakened one day, looked around, and asked, as David Byrne put it: “well, how did I get here?”  Those whose lives no longer seem to be based on a true story.

For them, this world is one of convergence, as fantasy merges with stark reality, past with future, in an odd mesh of tapestry, constantly being rewoven.

This is not the world we want, or remember, or thought we’d inherit, and we feel powerless to change it.  Whether we actually can or not is the subject for another day, for this rumination is about thoughts and feelings, and a hazy, electrified gray cloud which has enveloped us.  This is not your “feel good” story.  Rather, this is a story about a world which we did not create, but must inhabit; a world which bore, and will ultimately consume us.

 
This is a story about surviving, and existing, and getting by with what’s left.