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Trying to get away from the horrors of a “connected” civilization
Perceptions by Gerry Warner
Smart phones. Dumb people! Is that what historians 1,000 years hence will think when they uncover the sorry remains of our frenetic civilization that a millennium from now will have choked to death under the weight of its own excess?
I sincerely hope not, but I have to admit, as I grow older I grow increasingly pessimistic about the future, a future that should be filled with milk and honey, but instead seems to be leading towards some kind of Biblical Armageddon. In that decisive battle between good and evil, it’s left up to us to figure out who wins and who loses. And if you go by the way things are going now the outcome looks very much in doubt.
So let me take you into my personal room of horrors, that dark place at night when just before you fall asleep your brain seems to leave your body and takes on a life of its own.
My wrinkled up old brain usually does one of two things. If I’m lucky it climbs into a celestial wormhole and suddenly I’m seven years old again in short pants running through a flowery meadow under a deep, blue sky with my dog Nipper beside me, looking across the valley at the mountains and wondering which one I should climb. Unlike today, the mountains are not pockmarked with clear cuts, but roll off endlessly in a green, unbroken carpet of hills and peaks crowned with snow. Simple and idyllic, but isn’t that what the whole world seemed like when you were seven years old?
On other occasions, I take a different journey. Into the wormhole again, but this time there’s no deep, blue sky when I emerge. There’s a light, but it’s a blinding light that always seems to be flickering and there’s noise; eardrum shattering noise that never ceases and I feel very anxious. I know I’m supposed to be doing something, but I can’t figure out what it is because it seems there’s a thousand things to do and my brain is seizing up and I can’t decide which way to turn. As the cacophony of noise around me grows ever louder, I can’t make sense of anything. Then just when my head is going to explode, I wake up sweating and feeling a great sense of unease, an unease that often lingers throughout the day.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I dream all the time – I believe most of us do – and most of the time my dreams are completely nonsensical. I remember them for a few minutes after I get up. Sometimes, I get a good chuckle from them and then they’re gone from my mind never to be recalled. But I do wonder about those darker trips down the wormhole.
What’s driving the sense of unease I always feel down there? And recently I think I may have figured it out – future shock, a fear of what’s to come; a deep and abiding sense that all our knowledge and technology is not leading to a better place, but is taking away our humanity, our sense of being, our very souls. We’re becoming mere extensions of our machines. Our devices that were supposed to liberate us from the drudgery of day-to-day life have instead enslaved us. We’re moving faster all the time but we’re getting nowhere like a hamster in a wheel. The faster he runs the more he stays in the same place becoming increasingly exhausted with each passing second. What a hell of a life that must be.
Yet is it much different from the lives many of us are living now? Am I the only one to feel like a hamster in a wheel? Lately, I’ve been considering taking up meditation or Buddhism just to chill out a bit. I even signed up for a short meditation course and received some instructions on how to prepare for the experience. And you know what the first instruction was? It was to “unwire!” I kid you not.
In this always ‘connected’ civilization, people can’t pull themselves away from their ‘smart’ phones long enough to simply relax and contemplate the cosmos. If that’s truly the case, I’d say this whole damn civilization is in trouble.
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions, as weird as they sometimes are, have nothing to do with Cranbrook Council.
