That Big Bad Thing

Read Time: 4 minutes

Questions

And now, some questions…

What does a “healthy” life with technology look like?  

If I know the people putting the stuff together on the other side of the screen are in it to manipulate me, am I actually being manipulated? 

Where does my freedom to choose get tangled and blurred with someone else’s push to make me pick their options? 

Where do I lose and they win? 

What if none of it is actually a game? 

If people are using technology to “get” other people, where do they want to take them? To the crypto bank? To the dark side? To blissful ignorance? 

Never Knowing the Answers

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions except to say to the last group of four – “Yes, probably one of those”. Here’s the controversial follow-up statement. “They” don’t know the answers either. All they know is that people will go to all kinds of places for them. 

We will go to all of these places. We will go to the crypto bank, they will go to the dark side, and they will go to a place of blissful ignorance to stay connected. All of us along with them will deny the financial consequences, the mental destruction, and “happily” stay in our collective technology driven bubble.

I struggle with our technologically lit up world. This world appears to be powered mostly by my generation (“Z” if you were wondering). And, it’s a little scary to realize that this generation believes, at least based on the world of social media, that the world we inherited is very dark and full of injustice. 

This dark world we got is the fault of those who came before us. While we’re playing the blame game, though, we ignore something simple but important. We have all this time to spend on social media complaining, analyzing, judging, and commenting on this dark and doomed world because it has, in fact, been so comfortably made for us. Made by those same people that supposedly ruined it.

The same injustice and human behavior that my generation constantly criticizes is part of the reason why we get a platform. The “big bad” generations that came before developed the very stage we scream from shouting for them to be censored. We stand oblivious. We are ignorant as to how we got here. Our only hope, we think, is to scream that we have been left in the dark hoping someone will listen.

I’d Rather Not

Most days, I’ll skip trying to untangle it all. It can’t really be untangled, anyway. I get that my generation just wants to be heard and tell everyone else that the darkness is scary and the unknown future that has supposedly been set for us is just too much to handle. If only we could all collectively come together and fight the “big bad”, we could win all that we deserve.

There’s just one problem with all of this. Do we really think that everyone else had the future figured out? Do we really feel like we deserve to know what comes next when no one can know? If we believe we do, at the end of the fight we are trying so hard to pick and win, if we are victorious in enlightening the rest of them, we’ll be standing there alone. Not only will we be alone, we won’t have any of the stuff we so righteously believed was ours to inherit. 

We only thought we were fighting the people we believed were holding us down and slowly taking our freedom. Here’s a hard truth. Only we can keep ourselves free. They aren’t keeping us from anything. 

If we keep pushing, the fight will end with this reality. We will look back and see only one thing very clearly. It wasn’t them at all. We were the “big bad” thing all along. We joined them a long time ago when we logged on. All we will do by pushing and blaming is to take down everything they built – including ourselves.

And Now…

I think we are the ones that have lost the game. We fell in. We have to find a way out. Let’s take the best of the world and make it better. Let’s focus on what will keep us free. Let’s use our voices to talk about ourselves. Wait, we do that already. 🙂 Let’s talk differently. Let’s talk about our own ideas and stop focusing so much on how other people’s ideas are bad. 

Now is our time. Let’s leave them alone. We can’t keep wasting the time we have by trying to undo the past. It’s done. Let’s think about now. Not the “dark” of the future. We have no idea how many ways there are to find more light unless we start sharing our ideas now. Let’s stop griping and start living. We can find and shine our own light so bright they can’t miss it.

Now or Never…