It’s no secret. There’s an immaturity epidemic on the loose. Our bodies are growing but our hearts are not. Development is arrested and it’s showing up in every face you know.
You know, I was worried about this. I was worried about how millennials’ lack of maturity was going to come back to haunt us. One immature generation is scary enough. The way my heart jumps when when I think of the next one?
One crisis at a time.
The story goes we adopted all this technology to help us communicate and it turns out it’s done everything but that.
Okay, okay. I’ll cut it more slack. Our… what do you like to call these things…“phones”?… do help us communicate—but it’s more to the nature of ping-pong than one of any meaningful conversation.
In this culture, communication is more about throwing sticks to the other side of the line than getting the sticks to mean anything.
The way they sold us these gadgets were as if they were going to be communication jet packs!
That is of course, because we think everything deserves to be shot up, way, way high into the sky.
It takes a special person to realize we are already high in the sky already. Planet Earth is already in outer space.
But yes, it appears our communication as it was simply wasn’t good enough.
We were convinced we could do better.
Here in the hazy skies of my land, nature has never been enough.
Everything can be improved and technology will improve it.
They keep saying.
So that empty feeling in all of our chests is the improvement?
Who really knows how life is supposed to be lived!? Has anyone really thought about it?
Is anyone really thinking about anything?
We are. But we’re trapped behind media cages unable to really get through to each other.
Hilarious, sexy, infuriating, rich media cages.
Oh that’s a fun term. “Rich Media".
What makes media “rich”?
Personally, I’m not sure Meta has any idea what a rich media experience is.
If they did, they wouldn’t serve it on such a shitty platter.
Interfaces are sacred beloved.
They are where you hang your face all day.
Your face decorated with the body parts you need for daily life. Your mouth to eat. Your nose to breathe. Your eyes to see.
All hanging right there getting robbed by God knows who.
I, like you, can sense what’s really going on here.
I refuse to call this media “rich”.
To be cliché, It may be rich in calories, but not in nutrients.
Rich media are films and albums that breathe life into your blood. They can do shit like make you move across country or actually consider forgiving that stupid fuck.
There’s a grade to them that generates vitality.
You know…. Life!
You can put it on and watch a human spirit wake up.
The issue with my world is that we thought it was more important to figure out how to make high life expectancy before figuring out how to make it high quality.
If you take a good look around, quality seems to be the last thing on our minds.
We’ve lost grip of the baton that us as a species have tried to hold on to for forever, but from time to time just gets lost.
The knowledge of ourselves.
It doesn’t take a lot of wisdom to progress technologically.
It takes a lot of wisdom to know when to stop.
You first have to have start with an understanding that your environment is just as important as your body.
In many ways your environment is your body.
At this point the issue has become way bigger than the phones, the issue has become that we’ve designed our entire physical environment around them.
So even if you try to opt-out, your culture has not opted out with you and you risk ostracization, which by the way, is a valid threat to your health.
You risk exposing yourself to social, economic and political blind spots and getting left behind.
So are you prepared to keep up?
Have you felt how fast this wheel is going?
I mean, it’s going so fast, we can’t quite fathom it, can we?
Every time we try, we get picked up be the angels above who carry us gently into another scroll hole. Another infinite wheel.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one making this thing go so fast.
We get it. Tyler The Creator wants you to dance when you listen to this album because he’s witnessed what every millennial understands to be very true.
That when you take phones out of the environment, people behave differently. They might actually, dance.
Inventions affect our envrionments.
Environments affect our behavior.
If you insert a new invention into your environment, it will influence your behavior and those around you.
It can change you without you even knowing.
During the 1960s scientists conducted the “Eskimo Experiment” where they gave a small group of Eskimo children TV access and compared it to kids who didn’t have it and tracked how their IQ, vocabulary and cognitive abilities fell right to the floor.
The point is, if you keep introducing new highly influential inventions to your environment your behavior and cognition of your brain will morph over and over again.
It might morph so much you aren’t really sure what you’re doing anymore or if what you’re doing is even working anymore.
What we’re really talking about here are cultures.
And not culture in the LinkedIn-safe way to mean “Black/Hip”.
Culture in the way it really means.
Culture in the way kombucha has a culture.
It’s an organism. It’s alive.
The issue we have with culture now is that we discuss it as if it’s an adjective when it’s actually a verb.
Culture is activity.
It’s a busy-ness and a rhythm of a people who are neighbored to each other.
Who—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly,—depend on each other to survive. They share space. They share life.
Healthy cultures have a nice buzz to them, as any organism should.
For human beings to thrive they understand our individual health doesn’t stop at our body.
Our personal health is dependent on the health of our cultures.
It’s dependent on the activity happening around us and the activity we participate in.
It’s dependent on what kind activity our environment was designed to create and the activity it somehow keeps making you do.
By taking the phone out the room, Tyler is culture-making.
A simple environmental switch back to a less fussy media landscape.
We have the right to create our own cultures, our own environments, our own collection of activities.
We have the right to ask how certain inventions get here, or if we need them at all.
We have a right to healthy cultures.
Today’s cultures are making human beings that are freaking us out. It’s like humans who don’t know they are human.
Who don’t know they have beating hearts in the middle of their chests.
Who don’t know what tenderness is.
Who feel less.
Who care less.
Who are corny!!!
People who think it’s okay to be an immature, weirdo pieces of shit because that activity is what this culture produces. It’s producing batches and batches of these zombies, these people who don’t know how to connect with other human beings.
Who are some how convinced technology is our savior.
Healthy cultures cultivate the organisms inside them.
They help them fully develop so that they aren’t half-baked and under-cooked.
They help them become self-aware, mature, decent—but certainly not perfect—adults.
At least adults who know the value of feeling something. Who seek feeling alive.
I’m afraid the world’s going numb.
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Stay Free,
Alex
Somehow, with all of this communication, people are losing serious communication skills. Degeneracy is running rampant.
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