Kris Kristofferson released that song To Beat the Devil.
It boils down to not believing that nobody is listening.
That stuck with me.
We do still listen.
But not the way we used to.
There was a time when a newspaper reached millions.
You could hold it, and spill coffee on it.
It was read on the toilet, days later, and the story would still be there.
Nowadays, what do we see?
Joe Terrific has an account on X, or TikTok: 1.2 million followers.
Joe releases a new story three times a day. Sometimes more.
Every post is a transmission.
But Joe receives only 2,000 likes.
That’s 0.16%.
Where is the rest?
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how rarely a million likes appear, even when someone supposedly has a million followers.
Who are the other followers?
Are they ghosts?
Online transmissions become absurd.
Let’s say Joe announces his divorce, and posts it to his 1.2 million.
Same likes. Same heart emojis. Same low-grade response.
Then, the next day? Joe rants about a movie, adding to the noise where thousands of others are ranting about the same movie for relevance.
The heartbreak flows into the other sludge.
Some people do see it. Sure.
But most of them can’t do anything about it.
They’re not friends.
They’re not family.
They’re not even enemies.
This is the illusion of connection.
The illusion of reach.
We’re all broadcasting.
But who’s really receiving, and uhm… listening without immediately jumping into a comment to respond with yet another trite sad-face emoji?
So now, what the hell do we do?
Slow down.
Not every post, headline, video, confession, or meltdown deserves equal weight.
Because it doesn’t.
Some things deserve silence.
Others might earn a proper reply.
Most of the sludge will vanish regardless.
Go offline, dude.
Chat to the guy who runs the coffee shop around the corner.
Greet him. Ask him, “How’s life?”
It’s not creepy if you’re a regular.
Linger inside the offline world and experience that stuff without feeling a need to reply or comment.
Within the confines of this electronic world, we can literally, yeah, literally, “reach” someone in another hemisphere.
But we struggle to walk across the road to chat to the neighbor whose dog is barking non-stop.
None of this is new.
In the urban context, we’ve easily managed to isolate people close to us.
But here’s the pivot point.
The fracture.
The growing feeling of disconnectedness is catching up with a humanity that did not evolve alongside the tech.
Will you face the sunlight and cross the street?
Or will you merely lament the same feelings of loneliness and hollow interaction tomorrow,
after you’ve commented on Joe’s mega-million account?
You do realize Joe doesn’t know you.
He doesn’t care.
Because you are really one in a million to Joe.
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The world we now live in is an inheritance from the world of newspapers, newspapers which spoon fed us profit and wealth for the few as good, news as a negative and false picture of the living world of human kind, and then the equally negative and false world of narcissistic fame and notoriety. All that technology has done is divorce us further from reality. As you wrote, “Go offline, dude.” I would go one stage further though, defenestrate that box of tricks that assaults our homes and hearts with adverts, propaganda and falsehoods, via 24 hour ‘news’ broadcasts of events that are nothing to do with us or our local communities, other than creating a miasma of fear and mistrust of our neighbours. We can be free, bake a cake and ask our neighbour across the sun lit street. We can take it all back, if we stop giving ‘them’ the attention they demand to profit from our buying their trash.
Interesting view. So the invitation to consumerism embedded within the pages stuck as an annoyance? But we knew that they sold headlines for cash, as well as ad-space, didn’t we?
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