A Response For Class

Can there be a sadness greater than the one caused by disillusionment? Jacob Brackman discusses his transition from blind optimism of youth to reluctant cynicism of age in his "Shock Waves from the Baby Boom" article. While this sadness is startling, it is hardly unusual; actually, this discontent with life, culture, and surrounds is ubiquitous throughout modern American youth, although the majority of it is unnoticed. We have been given technology to make our lives better and easier, and it does just that; however, in doing so, technology has reduced the quality of human interactions from necessity to peripheral and drained the aspirations of the young.

My close friend moved to Austin over Christmas break. Over time, we have texted, skyped, and communicated through various other media avenues. We talk about whatever we think about, whatever comes into our minds. And although we are in constant communication, I know the next time we see each other, the first few hours will be awkward. We communicate with the help of technology, but we really don't have anything to say. This situation is common throughout young people today. Friends are friends because people don't want to be alone, so we surround ourselves with those around us and fill the empty spaces with words about pop culture and news that becomes irrelevant at the week's end. We don't have anything to say to each other anymore, but we talk more than ever.

I've met more people at college who have no idea what they are going to do with their lives. Moreover, I've talked to people who don't even have a dream job. People are caught up in the daily, repetitive, mundane exercise of existence that the ability to create your future is forgotten, and this is due to technology. We are so inundated with the capacity to create that we get bogged down in trivial creations, and we neglect to imagine an existence that is rich and full and vibrant. We become consuming nonexistence, which is different than the ideology of Buddhism that states that we are only a composition of other things. We don't exist, yet we are obsessed with ourselves.

So what can we do? How can live? The greatest action we can take against the foreboding and ominous future is to unplug. Unplug. Leave at home. Go for a walk in the park. Write a letter to a friend. Sit and watch cars drive by. Play music live. Essentially, do things that require one to merely exist (an act that has come to be seen as trivial). Just exist. Technology has allowed to be be in one hundred places at once, and in doing so, making us not really present anywhere. So just be. And learn that life is better when experienced through the wind, not the airwaves.