How many times do you have a truthful, deep conversation with someone? Probably not that often. I've been observing all around me, how people don't have common interests anymore, and instead resort to small talk about (anti)social media, and general consumerist behaviour, for example clothes and smartphones. You could call them similar passions, but they're more of destructive passions, if they can be named passions. People are being increasingly alienated from their peers, resulting in
ephemereal friendships, a degradation in the unity of communities, youth not caring about their parents, and the list can go on. The technological advancements have brought good and bad, but are the overwhelming majority of the advantages working for us or against us?
One could argue things have been always like that. To a degree, I agree, though from what I see, especially with the pandemic, things have went grossly bad. People have resorted to using censorship-filled and controlled Big Tech programs, a good example being Google Classroom, and how it's being forced on many EU and US students alike, Google making the young people, most of which can barely do more than scroll with their thumb or comment, dependent on them for years to come, as they'll only know to use their products. Although I'll not touch fully that subject in this post, it had to be mentioned due to it having an importance in today's post.
We got here by excessive materialism and consumerism that have ruined human relationships. People now associate or discriminate groups based on what shoes they've got, smartphones, glasses, followers etc., and not look at underlying values. In turn, this produces a sterile, deindividualized society, in which the upmost goal is earning money to spend it on commodities. Youth's dependence on social media has made generations Z and X, the most affected by this, to not talk to each other in person anymore, a sight we've all witnessed, how people are next to each other and IMs to message each other. Every product is catered towards making people more separated from each other, latest addition to the stock being the Metaverse.
Since the first smartphones appeared, we changed our lifestyle drastically overnight, didn't even realize it. The internet became fully a monopoly made to capitalise and extract money from our minds. We're not prepared to deal with such a thing, we can only try and prevent, and eventually stop it, by reducing our dependence on proprietary services that work against us and instigate our peers to violence through the so-called news, they make people mutilate themselves for beauty standards, just to be accepted into a niche group. We must fight for technological education, and teach people how they don't use technology, but technology uses them. The educational system has sold out to corporations, almost all universities have contracts with Microsoft.
Another reason people get into so many vices nowadays, aside from the continous alienation from our environment, is the fact that they want to be accepted into a group, they're desperate for it, due to not having any true connections. This can be seen with vaping in teenagers, social media, and other various distractions of the 21st century.
Nonetheless, it's a worrying aspect that, I believe, we can all agree on. People need to re-learn to talk to each other, without any technological interference.
If we, as people, are not united, we cannot act towards opressors or bring change, which is exactly what is wanted right now. We must be more resillient towards such petty distractions, outright refusing them. A fix is to find common goals and passions between people, not ephemereal objects, social media and such, but having actual connections like before all of this. We're plunging head first into an isolation and destruction of human relationships, perhaps like we've never
experienced before and it must be stopped, with determination towards our core values and life altogether as a community. It can be stopped if we act. Stop promoting social media, that actually makes people not talk to each other, stop promoting consumerism and materialism. Promote free and open source software, and promote education showing the dangers of the current WWW.
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