By Pablo Sanchez
5:00- My alarm clock on my iPhone goes off
5:01- I check my phone for emails
5:01 to 5:30 – I respond to emails and start opening up apps
5:30 to 6:30 – I explore the apps on my phone in the same ways I always do
6:30 to 7:00 – I put my favorite music on my iPod, shower and get ready for work
7:00 to 8:00 – I stream my favorite TV shows from my iPhone to my TV while I make and eat breakfast
8:00 to 8:30 – I listen to my audiobook on my train ride into the office
8:30 to 6:30 – I spend all day searching the Internet and writing on my computer
6:30 to 7:00 – I listen to my audiobook on my iPhone on my ride back.
7:00 to 8:00 – I stream my favorite TV show from my iPhone to my TV while I make and eat dinner
8:00 to 2:00 – I stream my favorite TV show from my iPhone to bedroom TV while I also play on my iPhone until I eventually fall asleep
Repeat.
This is my life. This is my existence. I spend all of my life it seems staring down and spend almost no time staring up. I can’t help but think about how odd that would seem to my ancestors only a couple generations ago. People, like myself, grow up and never really look at the stars anymore.
The stars have always been the greatest seed of wonder and imagination for the human mind. They likely prompted the first real “bizarre” thoughts, things like, “Where are we?”
Who could explain why every time the giant fireball in the sky went away the same smaller fires in the sky seemed to light exactly where they were the night before? Who could explain why throughout the night they moved across the sky? Who could explain that after many moons, certain fires no longer appeared in the same place each night? Nobody could and so it made us wonder.
Now I don’t wonder, I Google. Now I don’t imagine, I watch. Now I don’t question, I listen and read. I don’t have time to wonder, imagine or question. The computer has given me access 24 hours a day to the Internet and I don’t know how to escape its allure. It attracts me. It is like a sick game. It is like the creators of the Internet and all the computing devices which act like portals to bring us there knew that the mind couldn’t resist access to that kind of stimuli, to that kind of information. If we just stopped adding things to the Internet it’s suggested it would take me 57,000 years to read everything. If we didn’t add any more videos to YouTube it’s estimated it would take me 60,000 years to watch everything. This requires me to do nothing else but read and watch. The average human life span in the US is about 72 years. This means if I used these years to read and watch as much as I could starting from when I couldn’t even understand what I was reading and watching, I’d only be able to tackle about 0.06% of all the reading and watching I’d need to read and see it all.
I’m trapped in a computer. I’m trapped in a digital world. I look down instead of up. I type instead of speak. I watch instead of dream. When I die the tombstone people will visit will be on Facebook instead of a cemetery. I love this world and I hate it too.
Maybe the solution for myself is to simply take the next step, to figure out how to virtualize myself so that I can live inside my computer. Maybe if I could live there in a virtual state I wouldn’t feel trapped because I’d be free to explore the vastness of the digital world. I wouldn’t have to waste my time with all the other things that keep me from spending all 72 years of my existence looking down. Maybe this is the next phase, the pressure to drive human evolution to a new form, an immortal existence in a digital environment.
Maybe I’m not trapped in a computer today, but rather maybe I’m trapped in a mortal human body. Maybe the key to my existence is to finally escape to a virtual reality, a universe where everything exists and anything is possible. At least then I’d have time to read it all, see it all, and still look up.