The New Pandemic

Isolation, whether forced by governments or persons making a conscious choice to distance themselves from the madness that we have all experienced, opened the opportunity for advertisers to play test an unlimited amount of psychological experiments on the public. We now have adults and children using electronic devices to escape and cope with life’s challenges rather than facing their problems.

No longer do you have to leave the room to ignore someone or something that doesn’t interest you or offends you. You can do it in the living room, bedroom, or even at the dinner table. Person to person communication has change drastically just in the last few years. We can mute, block, delete, and forget people from our lives faster than ever before. We communicate in emojis and broke text messages that can easily be misinterpreted as positive, negative, or bizarre mumbo jumbo leaving the interpretation to the imagination of the of the beholder.

Starting your day with a cup of coffee on the porch watching the beautiful sunrise has been replaced with checking your social account to see if you finally got noticed or if your favorite celebrity has something else for you to buy or recommend you buy. We have lost our own attention. We are burning our retinas staring at a glowing device in the dark for hours searching for meaning or trying not to think or feel how meaningless it all seems.

We are living in a form of the matrix, where human/device interaction data gathering has become the batteries powering this brave new world. New synaptic connections are being formed in our brains to make us easier to manage and lead. Our prehistoric mental brains have been hijacked by their more sophisticated AI driven super computers. We are all very much awake in this pot of water as it continues to simmer us to a boil. And our minds may never be the same. Are you ready to unplug?