Notes on a Nervous Planet(8)
– Work. Robots and computers are taking people’s jobs. Employers are taking people’s weekends. Employment is becoming a dehumanising process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.
– Social media. The socialisation of media has rapidly taken over our lives. For those of us using it, our pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are magazines of us. How healthy can that be? We are seeing ever more frequent ethical breaches, such as Cambridge Analytica’s illicit harvesting of millions of psychological profiles through Facebook and the company’s use of these to influence electoral results. Then there are other serious psychological concerns. To be constantly presenting ourselves, and packaging ourselves, like potatoes pretending to be crisps. To be constantly seeing everyone else looking their best, doing fun things that we are not doing.
– Language. The English language is changing faster than at any time in history, according to research carried out by University College London. The growth in text speak and initialisms and acronyms and emojis and gifs as communication aids shows how technological advancements influence language (think also of how, many centuries ago, the printing press led to standardisations of spelling and grammar). So, it’s not just what people are saying but how they’re saying it. Many millions of people now have more text message conversations than face-to-face ones. This is an unprecedented shift that has taken place within a single generation. It isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it is definitely a thing.
– Environment. Some changes, though, are clearly bad. Straightforwardly, horrendously bad. The changes to our planet’s environment are so grave that some scientists have put forward the idea that we – or our planet – have entered a fundamentally new phase. In 2016, at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, leading scientists decided that we were leaving the Holocene epoch – one marked by 12,000 years of stable climate since the last Ice Age – and entering something else: the Anthropocene age, or ‘new age of man’. The massive acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions, sea-level rises, the pollution of our oceans, the increase in plastic (plastic production has multiplied 20 times since the 1960s, according to the World Economic Forum), the rapid extinction of species, deforestation, industrialised farming and fishing, and urban development mean for those scientists that we have arrived at a new interval of Earth time. So, modern life is, basically, slowly killing the planet. Small wonder that such toxic societies can damage us, too.
Future tense
WHEN PROGRESS HAPPENS fast it can make the present feel like a continual future. When watching a viral clip of a human-sized back-flipping robot, it feels like reality has become science fiction.
And we are encouraged to desire this state of affairs. ‘Embrace’ the future and ‘let go’ of the past. The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.
We are not encouraged to live in the present. We are trained to live somewhere else: the future. We are sent to kindergarten or pre-school, which by its very nature reminds us of what is about to hit us. School school. And once there, from an increasingly early age, we are encouraged to work hard so we pass tests. Eventually, these tests evolve into actual exams, which we know will dictate important future things like whether we pursue further education or decide to get a job at the age of sixteen or eighteen. Even if we go to university, it doesn’t stop there. There will be more tests, more exams, more looming decisions. More where do you see yourself in a few years’ time? More what career path would you like to pursue? More think very carefully about your future. More it will all pay off in the long run.
All through our education we are being taught a kind of reverse mindfulness. A kind of Future Studies where – via the guise of mathematics, or literature, or history, or computer programming, or French – we are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time.
To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.
I am coming to realise how wrong many of my aspirations have been. How locked out of the present I have found myself. How I have always wanted more of whatever was in front of me. I need to find a way to stay still, in the present, and, as my nan used to say, be happy with what you have.
Goalposts
YOU WILL BE happy when you get good grades.
You will be happy when you go to university. You will be happy when you go to the right university. You will be happy when you get a job. You will be happy when you get a pay rise. You will be happy when you get a promotion. You will be happy when you can work for yourself. You will be happy when you are rich. You will be happy when you own an olive grove in Sardinia.
You will be happy when someone looks at you that way. You will be happy when you are in a relationship. You will be happy when you get married. You will be happy when you have children. You will be happy when your children are exactly the kind of children you want them to be.
You will be happy when you leave home. You will be happy when you buy a house. You will be happy when you pay off the mortgage. You will be happy when you have a bigger garden. In the countryside. With nice neighbours who invite you to barbecues on sunny Saturdays in July, with your children playing together in the warm breeze.