This all seems so predictable, doesn’t it?
Everything we’re going through as modern humans — it feels fated, no?
We’re caught in this Herculean struggle between our animal selves — our neurology, our inability to look away from distraction — and the thing we want most.
We want peace in the face of death and freedom from the fear of it. We want to be held and comforted and told we’ll be okay, told that we needn’t spend our entire waking lives worrying about what’s coming. We want so desperately to be loved.
There’s nothing else that matters, is there? Nothing more important to us than that assurance, and we’d do anything for it.
But we can’t look away from our screens long enough to experience it. We can’t look away from the technology that’s captured our minds by hijacking our neurology. We’re prisoners — waking prisoners — in this life, hostage to the algorithms we’ve created.
Our thoughts are shaped by how information moves. Think of how information moves in the era of the internet, and why. Think of how our brains now have access to world events almost as soon as they happen. Think of all the information, the news of the day, all the entertainment created each day by each member of our species, all of it accessible at your fingertips.
It’s too much for the human brain to resist. It’s an impossible task to expect one person, let alone an entire generation of them, to turn off their phones. I hate to be so certain when I say it, but that will never, ever happen.
It’s horrible to watch, terrifying to know, and scarier still to find yourself in with the inmates, both prisoner and witness.