Ah...the things that make us neurotic. Let me count the ways...For me anyway, I have more than my share. For example, the frequency with which I keep checking this blog, tracking my readership to see how many hits today, and from which countries. Poor fragile ego. That insatiable need for popularity, for being praised, adored, or simply and more elementally, that insatiable need to feel wanted. At least I can assure myself that I'm not chained to social media like most people and constantly scrolling for likes on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or you name it. And really, why should we care about being liked by strangers we will never meet? But that is the whole problem with social media. You never really connect with those people, whom you're never going to see or talk to in person, nor get an idea of who they really are, of how they really live.
We are not wired or designed for going global. We humans really are at our best in person, one to one or in small groups. That is how we developed in the African savannah, then later as our earliest ancestors migrated to Europe, Asia, Australia, and eventually to the Americas. For hundreds of thousands of years it was all small bands and groups, everyone knowing each other's names, everyone knowing that each played a key role in the survival and wellbeing of the collective.
I am recalling how I was in a coffee shop with a friend on Friday morning, when three or four ageing cycling jocks came in and basically got on everyone's nerves. You know the kind of people I mean. They are generally between fifty-five and death, fitness-obsessed (because, being shallow and materialistic and success and status driven with no spiritual focus in their lives, not much of a moral compass and no developed ethical sense, of course they are also going to be terrified of ageing and death), middle to upper middle class, and ridiculously dressed in garish and skin tight cycling clothes often displaying corporate logos. And they talk loud. Absolutely unconscious of the people sitting near them, ss one loudmouth idiot, likely older than sixty, was, so that I could no longer keep my train of thought while chatting with my friend, and it was only when I raised my voice that that idiot got the hint and finally lowered his voice.
But this is only one of many, many examples of how cut off and isolated most of us are from people who are not like us. There are so many of us and our population keeps growing, despite birth control and family planning, and there is just rapidly shrinking space left for all of us to share. We live in an age of narcissism, while coping with shrinking space and this is a particularly scary phenomenon. Something has to change in our mentality. Yesterday, while browsing in Chapters Indigo for books, then shopping at a No Frills, again, I was constantly having to get around idiots who were behaving as though they were the only persons there. Everyone treating public space like it's their own personal stage, and why not just give them a standing ovation. Oh, but they will just die from embarrassment!
We have to start engaging more with one another, and with strangers, and we have to develop a sense of us, and that nobody is an Other. Our future survival is going to depend on this, Gentle Reader!
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