For me, these past couple of years since COVID have been a strange dichotomy in that on an individual level this has been the best period of my life, but on a macro scale, things have never felt so draining and hopeless… which brings us to 2022 where this intensified further. Before you dismiss me on the macro scale I am not talking about some faraway issue that I attach myself to in order to feel some level of uncertainty in my cushy life. The effects of this mass formation of apathy in our culture and attitude are very apparent to me on a ground level when I walk outside the bounds of my home. People are more distant from each other than ever. This weird energy of animosity if you wear a mask indoors or if you don’t wear a mask. The dredge of literally everything constantly always trying to project advertisements on us… never. Missing. One. single. Opportunity. People feel more guarded. More unwilling to have random conversations, but maybe that is the antisocial behavior we have all just absorbed over the past couple of years. I doubt it though because the fear to talk out of “line” is a very apparent and obvious feeling. I am saying this as somebody that couldn’t be happier personally (things could always be happier). At first, I thought I just had rose-tinted glasses on about the energy of the times when I was growing up (still am), but as I have examined my thoughts further and have read more and understood more I have come to a conclusion which is the theme for 2022: things have never felt so fake and dreary during my lifetime. This is simply because it just feels like there isn’t as much passion for providing a service, creating a product, or entertaining people as much as capturing all of your attention to project advertisements at you to hopefully capture your wallet. Most of everything tells us to consume as much as possible at all times.
It isn’t all melancholy though. Over the course of this year, I have learned to have an appreciation for the simple things and have developed personal strategies to limit my exposure to attention-sucking machines like social media. I have started adapting more systems that keep my personal information from being sucked to sell me more things because nothing is eerier than seeing ads about something you had a conversation about a day prior appear. On a personal level, this year I made more effort to read more (highly recommend it) and learn to be more productive. Learned to love harder and learned just a bit more about myself.
Overall, 2022 is a warning, but I do not feel is a lost cause. As much as I have been shitting on things like social media or Amazon I also do not see them as evil entities, but more so as high-risk high reward mechanisms that people need to learn to balance in their life or else be sucked into their void. To me, it is like the idea of a black hole. If we learn about it from a distance there is a chance to gain incredible knowledge about something or even learn to harness its energy, but if we get too close to it there is a high possibility for absolute obliteration. Overall to me, 2022 has been both a beautiful and hideous year with the beauty outweighing things, which is why I still have a possessive perspective on things. As I said I have never loved life, things, and people to this extent ever before. I have never appreciated what was once deemed as boring or simply more. My final words are Happy New Year and may 2023 be better not just for me, but for all.
-Fable 20230101