When I think of the internet, I don’t think of a serious place. I don’t think of an information super-highway where top professionals can source any kind of information they want, network with colleagues and like-minded individuals and make informed business decisions, no.
When I think of the internet, I think of one big-ass playground full of kids running around with cake all over their faces.
I’ll tell you what’s happened. Thousands of years of human evolution have pushed us so far up the food chain that nothing, nothing can fuck with us, except us. Provided you live in a country that’s not wracked by war, famine, pestilence or death and you earn a steady income, chances are you’re so comfortable and bored with day to day life, whether you admit it or not, that you’ll do any fucking thing to escape the hum drum, and THAT’S what the internet has become, a giant escape hatch.
Grown men and women the world over are sending one another FAIL mails, lolcats, pyramid scheme spam (send this to 10 friends in the next 20 minutes and your penis will grow by 3 feet!), and lame joke emails that get sent to you by four different people, the last one being your own mother.
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m just as guilty as the next guy of indulging in the mindless garbage floating around on the interwebs. I enjoy a FAIL mail just as much as the next guy, but the question I often find myself asking is, What the fuck is happening to my mind?
Do you ever find yourself thinking that? All that junk we consume, all the media we are bombarded with on a daily basis, it all sits in our minds somewhere, and like a mustard seed you swallow into your lung by mistake, it’s growing in the damp and the dark and that can’t be good.
I meet these people with increasing frequency that have very clearly made it their life’s mission to completely discard the things that make them think or feel anything beyond a purely superficial level and I get ticked off when I meet people like that. We have no idea what we are capable of, it’s possibly the best part of being human. You think you know yourself and your boundaries, but you’ll find if you have the courage to step outside of your comfort zone and test those boundaries, they move.
Isn’t that the reason we exist? To grow and learn and gain as much experience as possible? Fuck, this life is a gift, you don’t know how fucking lucky you are to be living it, how fucking lucky we all are to be alive is this world of supreme chaos where in the same day, millions of people will meet and fall hopelessly in love while millions more will stand in mourning over the graves of their parents or even more heartbreaking than that, their kids.
I’m paraphrasing badly from one of my favourite movies of all time, Adaptation. You remember the bit where Kaufman goes to the script writing seminar held by Robert McKee? Well McKee ends up attacking Kaufman after Kaufman makes the statement that ‘nothing much happens’ in the world, it’s brilliant.
Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life!
And I think this is exactly the problem this modern world of ours faces. We don’t know crap about life. We shut all that stuff out, we focus only on things that make us feel happy and make us feel good because ‘there’s enough shit in the world already’. Here’s a news flash – that ‘shit’ you refer to, that’s LIFE. Running away from the things that challenge us or scare us or force us to really feel something, isn’t LIVING, it’s just killing time and when it comes to killing time, the internet is KING.
I don’t have any answers, yet. All I got is words, fightin’ words and nothing to back them up with except my primal sincerity. Still though, I can’t shake this feeling that we’re being dumbed down, all of us, by the media we consume in nauseating quantities and worse than that, we’re enjoying it.
-ST
