Are Things Easy?
As a hardworking individual, I'm faced with a difficult decision: do I choose to have a smartphone in my life and give in to collective consciousness, or do I resist corporate overloads and maintain my own free will? It's a trade-off, as having a smartphone could lead to an arguably better life, but is it really worth it? Read on to explore the implications of this complex decision and discover how to draw a line in the sand.
Making the Tough Decision: Smartphones or Free Will?
By Michael Levin
Monday, November 7, 2022
No. You might think they are, because r that’s because you practiced hard and programmed yourself up to walk and talk when you didn’t mind doing so and didn’t have much other choice. Now you do. Loopholes will stand in place of real experience and talking big works for long as you’re not challenged.
Society is now coddling those who are easily offended and living on big societal loopholes. If only everyone had to carry their fair share in the social contract, you’d have an outcry of “unfair” and “unjust” in the ranks of the loophole-dependent easily offended. They’ve made cheating easy, but those who take that route in life have opted out of what I feel life has to offer.
The joy of being a craftsperson in some area of interest that brightens your soul and betters the world. You’ll mostly find thinly veiled cynicism in the attitude of the loophole-dependent cheaters of the world because they don’t know what it is to love. Bitterness and devaluation of all that is good in others lives is their stock and trade.
The ability to achieve creative flow or get into the zone, play music, produce product or otherwise lower entropy is hateful to them—often secretly because haters deep-down know they hate first and to do so is wrong. So they hide this tendency projecting their idea of a perfect life. I think there’s a lot of those folks on Instagram.
The chief key goal of socialmedia-projecting life-cheaters is to attain the materially coveted, make it look easy, and to not have to put in the work. Being born hitting the genetic jackpot or into ideal circumstances can promote this personality type. Dipper’s comment about the rich cheating at life comes to mind.
Valuable, worthwhile things are often presented in our lives and in media as easily accomplished. You look and say, oh that’s easy or they make it look so easy. But the truth is that athlete, musician, artist, doctor or whoever make it look easy because they put a lot of effort and discretionary time into it. They’ve overcome loss of morale and setback after setback. They just kept getting up to overcome those setbacks more than others.
How many among us don’t learn to crawl, walk and speak? Not many. These skills come to us almost automatically. They still take time and work and devotion. It’s just you’re at a phase in your life where you don’t have much of a choice. Your environment and social circumstances are going to program up your final stages of becoming an autonomous but still quite interdependent node.
Not everyone can read and write. Not everyone is literate. This is where the automatic skill-acquisition stops and special efforts need to be made to learn to encode and decide the spoken language and thus thoughts. This is where society starts to divide itself between those happy to go into more base-animal automatic and static states or survival versus real thinkers and changers and improvers of the world.
It’s easy to want to be in the world changer category but then through realities of everyday life be ground down into something that has the scramble and hustle and suppress it’s true spirit even just to survive. It’s the inevitable grind of curious child into anxious teenager into defeated adult. I think we’d be a lot happier and better off as a society if we were all scientists, or involved in our collective improvement and advancement as a species.
Instead, we are enchanted and hypnotized by spells cast across hardware and networks and devices and platforms and media. It’s all about the story telling and the stories. We consume those stories and have our behavior tweaked this way and that to maximize certain corporate profits. The General Electric NBC and Westinghouse CBS replaced by Apple and Google—more effective tracking our behaviors and peddling products to us than the old military industrial complex ever was.
Our ability to draw a line in the sand of our own lives is increasingly challenged. I mean are you going to not have a smartphone in your life? Are you going to not let yourself merge into the collective consciousness? How much are you going to maintain your own free will and how much are you going to subjugate yourself to corporate overloads? Of course it’s in exchange for an arguably better life. But is it?