Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
Famous lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Our generation puts such an emphasis on being ‘chilled-out’ and ‘laid-back’. Yet we are the ones that have the maximum victims of stress and anxiety. We are the smart ones, the so-called planners, the people that have laptops hanging on their arms which they use to meticulously book every detail of a trip. If we are constantly securing the details of out future, then where is our enjoyment of the present?
Our society has become ‘carelessly organized’ now. We believe the most in spontaneity and excitement yet beneath all our actions is an undercurrent of organization. “Hey are you free or do you have other plans?”--how many times have we heard ourselves say this to other people and vice versa? Stress has become a ‘life partner’ in this generation. We are in a constant battle to ‘bust’ it sometimes with yoga and aromatherapy and sometimes with cigarettes and alcohol.
We are in a state of constant planning--for us, everything that has not been looked up before or planned before is an ‘unknown’ evil. Let us take, for instance, our obsession with review sites. WE ‘yelp’ or ‘burrrp’ for restaurants, we skim frantically through Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews and we are simply not ready to buy anything from a particular brand of cereal to our home theater system without reading a few Google or Amazon reviews. Where. then is the thirst for experience? Are we not making our experiences predictable? I agree with online reviews for buying big and expensive items such as a home theater system or an HDTV but is that all that there should be to this process? With all the virtual reality at our disposal, we can simulate every process but the experience of our senses is still missing. Our visual, auditory and tactile senses have still not been completely replicated by any machine. We miss on a great deal by denying ourselves that experience.
Tensing Norgay and Edmund Hillary did not have a Google satellite view map when they scaled the heights of Mt. Everest. Of course I appreciate the convenience that Google satellite view has given us but it exists to assist and not the other way round! So taking a cue from Emerson, an avid explorer, let us not make ourselves so handicapped by the internet that our pioneering spirit dies. For that would mean no discovery and without discovery we will forever be stuck in a time warp.
