What Kind Of Future Do We Really Want?
In our hearts, I don’t think we want the kind of future we think we do. The future we tend to think we want — which perhaps not so coincidentally is the future media and big business is always selling us — is one where ever-increasing technology is always providing us with some new convenience, option, or spectacle. But I think we’re drowning in that sort of thing already. We have so many conveniences they have come to complicate our lives. We have so many options we spend our time choosing rather than using or enjoying them. We have so much spectacle it has deadened our capacity to experience awe. Who among us does not have more seemingly helpful aps and options on our appliances than we can keep up with? Who among us has not witnessed the CGI flight of dragons and the stomping of dinosaurs to the point such things can no longer impress?
The future we’re told we want is in truth a rootless reality, one which is continually killing the past even as it recycles it. It constantly repeats archetypes while depriving us of the actual memories we’ve come to know and love. In other words, as soon as you come to love Toby Maguire as Peter Parker, they’ll yank him out and install a new guy with a retelling of a story that once seemed to have substance. The memories you will share with your children are not your own. There is nothing enduring or of substance any longer and even the past is constantly changing.
They provide us with ultra, ultra realistic fantasy, give us utterly believable images of aliens blowing up the planet. They give us women (or men) with fake 46DD boobs. They give us things that look like the things we want but are in fact mere simulations. They give us pagentry instead of connection.
We just want a simple meal with loved ones but that is now forever deprived to us. No child will be present because their thoughts and attention will be in the ether, distracted by well-paid social media influencers who hold a power over our youth that no tyrant of past ages could have imagined. As we sit at the dinner table our children are being told that they are not pretty enough as they are but need products and implants and the right vocabulary and the right attitude in order to be accepted.
We want to taste tranquility, to drink deeply of it, but we never can. Beeps and buzzing will forever awaken us from our revery. The very words “tranquility” and “revery” cannot be fathomed by those born and raised by screens. Every beep and buzz and bing is intended to keep you from reaching that sacred part inside your soul in which you find true contentment. Every intrusion and expensive special effect is meant to keep you from formulating your own thoughts, from feeling your own feelings. That’s why they have to blow up an entire city block in a commercial just to sell you a damn cookie. If you stop to think about it, this is the most controlling relationship you’ve ever been in. And they are doing EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to ensure that you don’t have time to stop and think about it.
What do we want for our future? More noise? More spectacle? More realistic falsehood? As for me, I would like to hear birds outside an open window. I would like to feel a cool breeze on a warm summer day that does not bring with it the smell of distant forest fires. I would like clean beaches and drinkable water and places I can go to be alone or with those I choose, safe from the eyes of surveillance cameras.
I want nature, damn it, and the time to commune with it. I want unsegmented gaps of time where I can live rather than consume or respond to beeping devices.
I want to look inside to find out what it is I truly want rather than have my wants explained to me by some authority figure on TV with 6-pack abs and capped teeth. I want to worship the god of nature, not the god of commerce. I want a reality without the world “virtual” in front of it.
I want not to want anymore but simply to be. And they will never simply let me be.