A Modern Suffocation
We take for granted and celebrate the advanced nature of our modern life, with its unprecedented information, opportunities and access. We can do so much more now than we’ve ever been able to do. While sitting on our couch, a couple of clicks and hey presto, our dinner. Changing our legal name takes a couple of months. Heck we can change our gender. Engulfed by wonderful choices, and all of life’s ease, we are indeed.
We have so much choice it’s even hard to get bored, especially if you’ve got a phone. Which most of the modern world, teenagers et al, do. Even if you don’t have one handy, there’s a portfolio of other screens, from your tablet to your TV, to keep you occupied ad infinitum. Those who grow weary of the internet might well be the updated version of Dr. Johnson’s quip about those bored of London… bored of life. There’s something in the four billion web pages for everyone.
As accomplices to modern life’s glitter, we are also passive subjects to its de-humanizing and to it sucking the life out of us. Without the time to reflect, in itself ironically a human distinction, our choices are suffocating what makes us human. Some of the most important institutions of our ancestral past have decayed – possibly more sharply in recent years. The modern amongst us seem to be less of what makes us human.
Take our diet. Once upon a time, we used to eat food. Today, we eat a processed hybrid of food and laboratory chemicals. Real food is hard to get. Even bread, our culinary partner for ten millennia, today has diglycerides and stearoyl-2-lactylates. Almost everything we eat is processed and laced with the creation of chemistry labs. In fact, our chickens and cows may as well be cyborgs – trapped from birth to death, a lifeless existence.
The “easier and cheaper” tune, the backdrop trance to modernity’s grand de-humanizing venture, extends beyond our dietary compounds. Not only do we not have the time to prepare food, but we’ve managed to outsource parenting as well – to the nanny, tablet or school. And by the time it’s too late, we’ve realised that our children haven’t come quite developed as we’d hoped for – or we don’t have much of a relationship with them. The thirty seconds per day per child of quality time didn’t quite work?
Finally, there’s rest and repose, which have been decimated from our routine, shattering our mental health. From the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep, most of us are at it. We are at it on a treadmill without a stop button to the point of exhaustion. Every single day. Gone is the era when we might get away for a few hours a day, haul our mind into a calm retreat or simply not have pressing responsibilities to fulfill.
In the modern world, we might well have a lot more choice and opportunity. But what good is it if it diminishes our own human selves?