tired of
My vision of the future has changed with age. And I am talking not about a general vision of the future for the humanity, but rather about the idea of my personal life. The very thought about working standard 9-to-5 job would scare me when I was 14, but now I find a blessing calmness in the perspective of stability. The Czech lifestyle influenced me a lot: now I understand that one can live a small mediocre life without any significant achievements and still be happy. One does not have to prove anything to anyone, and it is OK. The idea that most Russians might find depressing and shamefully unambitious – the ugly cargo-cult of American hustle culture. And I feel that I am not alone. Why do more my peers refuse the idea of the pursuit of success and prefer slow calm life? Did we just get older or there is something else?
I think the reason main reason – and here I can say not only for me, but for my peers too - we do not expect anything from this world anymore. When I was a child, the world was big and open, even though I learned it through cartoons and series. Now, when I am relatively adult, the world is close: my peers cannot afford to have a house, or to make a child. My father in my age raised a second son, and what about me? Living in a little room in a student dorm and watching gaming streams on Twitch, procrastinating in a state of perpetual childhood. And I am not alone: the whole generation of people were promised a safe open world, but we found ourselves trapped in a capitalistic cage of endless consumption that preys on our primal impulses, that was built by our parents. I feel we are disconnected and polarized as never before.
Honestly, I get sick watching YouTube videos on this topic. And it was not the touch of leftism of some speakers – I am quite used to the cliché about evil corporations (which I cannot disagree with). I rather felt desperate and powerless in front of the twenty first century slavery. And the worst of it, this slavery is voluntarily: we pay to buy the newest version of a digital slave collar and feed it with our personal information. We go out of our way to be overstimulated, we compete in a performing consumption and conforming to an imposed lifestyle. Our brains are drained by pornography; our relationships are devalued by Tinder. Nobody made us to live like this, it was our free choice. But was it conscious?
I often come back to the thought I heard several years ago. It says that previously only the rich people were able to afford using the Internet and technologies, and poor people had to live offline life. Now it changed dramatically: only rich people can afford offline entertainment, gatherings and so on, meanwhile watching series and playing computer games is a prerogative of the poorest ones. Is it a conscious choice too?
Several years ago there was a broad discussion about the book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. He insisted that nowadays there is less violence in the world than ever before. Today, 15 years later after release of this book, everything is not that certain. But even if we agree that there is less violence (with I highly doubt), are we happier than, let us say, 70-100 years ago? We traded slow pace of life for an iPhone, changed religion for psychotherapy, replaced physical labor with rat race, and sold freedom for an illusion of stability and safety of digital gulag. Algoritms are proved to be even more dangerous and disconnecting than good old physical violence.
I do not want to say that we are doomed, that mankind is near the final point of its existence or something like this. I just hope that there will be a day when people get bored of TikTok, delete their Facebook profiles and gather to sing a song around a campfire. It is not nostalgy or a hippie ideology, but a strong wish to be feel alive again. To feel less digital and, finally, more human.