"When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional."
XX:XX:XX
Humans discovered fire and allowed us to see in the dark, this gave us more time so we invented stories that we told to each other orally. We replaced the fire with a candle and those oral stories with books. We replaced that candle with a light bulb and those books with television. We’ve now replaced that TV with smart devices which now occupy and invade all of our waking moments. Forever plugged in, over-socializing and commodifying every aspect of our existence. Every action turned into a data point to be mined and sold to the highest bidder on the white market. Or flooded onto the dark web for some yahooboi to scrap and send us an email about how they recorded us pleasuring ourselves to a website filled with people just like us. Who have turned to sex work to fill the pay gaps left in their income due to a fleeting job market filled with low skilled, underpaid service jobs, but no sight of any lower management or job that allows them to move up in the world. Alone we sit, device in hand telling ourselves that we can’t wait for the lock down to end so we can go back to “adulting” and living the over-stressed, over-socialized, over-stimulated and over-anxious life where everything is “content” to be consumed. Maybe the lockdown showed us the lives we are suppose to be living. Maybe the lockdown was a time to reflect and see how the intimate moments, the relaxed park hangouts, the small gatherings which allowed us moments of discovery that has been removed in this post-modern world where we preview and lurk every space we will enter, every location we will travel, every aspect of the future researched, planned, starred, tagged and memorized. What’s left to discover in this post-modern world? What wonderment and awe is left? Maybe Nietzsche was wrong, God wasn’t dead. It would take another century and major technological advances, but God died a slow death, not a bang, but a whisper as Elliot said. Now that God is dead and the days of the “last man” are upon us… Maybe it’s time for us to order an UBERmensch.