Some thoughts on Lap 67

     In a couple weeks, I will begin my 67th lap around the Sun.  

    I have noted that , as one gets older, one gets acutely aware that there are fewer days in front of them, and more days behind them.   As a result, one pays more attention to the passage of minutes and hours, because these add up to days, and days to weeks, months and years. 

     There are any number of things that we spend too much time on, and each of these uses up time that can never be replaced. 

    As is my annual habit, what follows is a somewhat more focused stream of consciousness:

    There are a few things that, in my opinion,  occupy an inordinate amount of our time, using up a totally non-renewable resource.  

    One is the Internet in general, and Social Media in particular. Most of us would not work for free, yet we do so every time we log on to Facebook, Twitter, etc., and do it constantly. We even have our phones set up to alert us to another's beck and call.

    You might wonder how that is, so allow me to explain. 

    For a moment, please ignore the obvious irony in my using an Internet blog to broadcast my thoughts...

    We think that Social Media is pretty cool, especially because it is "free".  We don't often wonder, however, how the super wealthy companies that provide it get to be super wealthy.   Its actually pretty simple.   

    Social Media's product is its users.  They sell our information.

      No, not our personal information--although there are lots of concerns about privacy--but things like our demographic information, our location, our thoughts on everything from our kids, our recreational activities, our political leanings (more on that later), and any number of data points that we generate with every post made or read.   The companies collect a lot of information, like Santa, they know when you are sleeping and they know when you're awake. (Don't think so?  My Fitbit and my iPhone both have the ability to track my sleep and my location at any time)  

    The data collected is gathered up and sold to advertisers, marketers, political types, and the list goes on.  Remember the "Cambridge Analytics" scandal in the news a few years back? From the looks of it, the Social Media types make LOTS of money in the process.  

    Point is, we spend way too much of our lives on Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc. 

    And we are making someone else very rich in the process! 

    Another thing we spend too much time on is our gadgets, the omnipresent screens in our lives. 

    IN the interest of full disclosure, I have an iPhone, a Kindle Fire, and a Fitbit.   If I used any or all of them to their fullest capabilities, I would be monitored 24 hours a day, and would never know a moment's peace. 

     I would never know the simple pleasure of browsing in ,say, a book store.  I am one of those dinosaurs that still likes the feel of a book in my hand, the smell of the pages or pleasure of seeing the number of pages left in the novel get smaller as I get closer to the end of the story. I like my Kindle, but more because its convenient.  But, I just can't get the things I mentioned that I can get from a book.  To make matters worse, Amazon uses the info gleaned from my choice of books, among other things, to target ads.  Remember what I said about selling our info? 

    With the pandemic, we couldn't avoid our screens. Sorry, but a Skype call or a Zoom meeting lacks any pretense of human contact.

     If I lived my life constantly looking at my Fitbit or my phone, I would miss so much of what goes on around me, but someone, somewhere would know how much water I drink in a day, how many steps I take, where I have been and where I might be going, as well as my heart rate.   Among other data points.  

    I can't speak for you, but I like to believe that my life is more than mere data. 

    Guess what I am saying is put down the gadget every now and then!  Actually talk to someone. Maybe even write a letter. Email is faster, to be sure, but how many times have you said something in an email, or hit the "reply to all" and regretted it?  

   (Just a random thought..am I the only person who remembers the North Koreans threaten to detonate a nuke in the upper atmosphere, and cause an electromagnetic pulse?  Think what that might do to all the gadgets we depend on!) 

    I could go on, but you get the point.  

    The last thing I want to point out is that we spend too much time on politics. 

    To be sure, who governs and how is important, but in our hyper partisan, over analyzed political environment, it has reached the stage where even trivial things take on a life of their own.   There is an entire industry out there that makes lots of money keeping us at each other's throats, destroying our individual relationships, our families and our institutions. Its running 24 hours a day, year in and year out, and never takes a break.  

    Politics infects everything.  I use the word "infect" because the nature of politics is such that it multiplies like a virus, and causes harm before it burns out.  It mutates into more harmful forms, and can't be cured.  

    And it uses natural mechanisms to wreak havoc on those infected. 

    To that end, I partake of political content sparingly, and only enough to get the facts.  I will form my own opinions, so have no need for those of anyone else.  I find that I am a lot more relaxed, and at peace than I was as a "political junkie" (another apt term, don't you think?) 

    

    All of these things conspire to make us less human, I think.  Whether or not one believes in a higher power, I have to ask that, given that we are in this place in this time, shall we waste the time allotted to us? Is our obsession with politics or absorption with our screens the best use of our time? 

    Will your legacy be the relationships you enjoyed, or that you had a million Social Media followers?    Or worse, who you voted for? 

    I know what mine will be.  

    May God bless you in every way.