7th
Simplicity
I’m nostalgic for the past. Even for times when I wasn’t alive. When everything was more simple. When people used pay phones…I remember going to the mall and having to call my mom to pick me up with either two quarters, a phone card, and using a landline cemented in the ground. Now those phones are obsolete. Convenience has been exploited by the free market, and we can each just dive down into our pockets and hook into not just our friends and family but the entire world through the handheld internet. Our social networking has been convoluted into facebook, myspace, AIM, IChat, eharmony, jdate, and whatever other networking tool you can think of. I feel like traditional “courting”, telephoning the landline to actually face a confrontational social situation, or dating, is gone. We’re becoming an extremely sexual, but shy culture. We glamorize our hollywood role models and celebrate their good looks and style, but our generation is more indirect and insecure with sexuality when it comes down to it. Technology has impeded the facilitation of natural social relationships, and you can see it everywhere…
And although technology has so many upsides, like HAVING the world at your fingertips by flipping open your phone, we’ve already become desensitized to it. We’d rather know what Brangelina’s 11th adopted kid’s nickname is than surf the internet to read about why we’re going to be paying off the debt of the last 10 years of disastrous government policy. We’re a cheap thrills, sugar-coated, fluffy, superficial culture. Although Obama has faith in the American workforce, I’m not sure which generation he’s talking about. The greatest generation? They’re dying off. The baby boomers? They’re retiring. Us? No, we’re stuck stalking people on facebook while our economy’s falling apart. I’m not really sure what his election victory means in terms of how genuine a response the country will get from its “new era of responsibility”. He’s definitely targeting the right goal, but he has to rely on our lazy ass generation to meet it.
It’s not all our fault that we’re like this. We’re reaping the benefits of the post-WWII economic boom, and the catharsis of a 60s generation that was able to combine economic and financial prosperity with progressive values. No one can force civics down our throats. Not in our society. And we can’t lay blame solely to the complicated globalized and modern world. This is the world we live in, and we must move forward with whatever that may be; even if it’s digital code instead of analog, and our shareholding is dispersed in economic derivatives that no one can understand…
I guess we have to find simplicity in a world that isn’t. Maybe I need to do that on my own. If you haven’t caught on yet, this entire blog is in its entirety a self-projection…
