From Fast Food to Fast Thoughts
2020 is the year that just vanished. 2020 was the year when emotions, smiles, and touches disappeared. 2020 was the year when almost all our planet went virtual.
All social behaviors, such as friends and family gatherings, handshakes, hugs, that have, scientifically, proven to increase our love hormone (oxytocin), our happiness, and to prolongate our life expectancy, became in no time, a life-threatening trigger. What used to reassure us turned into a source of stress and fear. Not only did we distance ourselves from each other socially, but we also had to reinvent the new meaning of social and professional community. Thanks to our advanced technologies, we rapidly changed our homes into schools, offices, gyms, care facilities, and more. We all made the best of it, or did we?
As we left the real world for the virtual spheres, our insecurities got more unbearable. Just let us take a moment here. Before Zoom and video calls, the only times we got to see our faces were in the mornings and evenings, in front of the bathroom mirrors, when getting ready to go out or go to bed. Except for actors or some vlogs professionals, we rarely see our faces interacting, live, with others. So, how shocking it was to stare at our faces on-screen while watching our friends or colleagues! It felt for some of us like seeing someone who talks like us but looks different. Is that how I look? Sound? These feelings gave rise to a load of insecurities. We lost touch with reality and started hiding behind filters and virtual background, and got reduced to our ideal retouched floating heads on a screen. These changes seemed trivial and fun at first, but they were not inconsequential for our mental health.
Our physical appearances were not the only things we altered. Our communication as a whole changed drastically. Today, we say a lot without talking much. A hashtag will express our anger, our love, our distress, and a call for help. A hashtag suffices to unfold thousands of reads and information from which to choose. We get showered by so much information we choose none, and we listen to none. Too overwhelmed to think, we let the so-called “influencers”, decide for us. They do an excellent job at chewing it all for us. Then, they send their flocks of bluebirds into the clouds to feed us right in our nests. The same way we use filters to hide the fine lines on our faces, we blur our unorganized feelings and ideas with a hashtag. These minimalistic, surgical communications are cluttering our minds, not simplifying it.
A new form of the market had risen in the middle of chaos. Opportunists found a new kind of service: Fast Thoughts. Similarly to fast food that has been a hit for over sixty years, surprisingly not because it is good for you or unbelievably delicious but because it is fast and convenient. Today, Fast Thoughts deliver the same service, feeding our brains with already made, easy to swallow, and conveniently packed with social ideas for our private, community, and political lives. We then hit each other with “hashtags” and “likes”, sharing others’ (influencers) thoughts. But what do we think? Who do we like? It is all over on social media. Not all of us dare to put our thoughts. Instead, we would share a written statement or an article from someone else. Often many contradictory ideas are reshared from the same person. We do it without knowing it. One wonders if we believe what we share and if we give it careful thoughts. Or were we just attracted, at that moment only, by the pretty layers of that Fast Thought as we would be by that new pumpkin spice latte? So, like we started to accept and face the damages of fast food on our physical health, it would be wise to stop Fast Thoughts from damaging our lives and start with that intensive brain workout.
Sadly, we also love fast. We hit everything and everyone with a raffle of “likes”, the bad and the good news, the dead and the living, the horrible and the beautiful. We do not make the difference anymore. 2020 got us to pause and ask: are we losing our humanity? Do we still care for friends, families? Or, to be more precise, when did we stop caring? 2020 has just accelerated the process. With or without the pandemic, we would have been there, earlier or later. We have isolated ourselves more and more. At work or home, our voices got turned off. Our tongues and lips become useless. Others decide for us, and we avoid difficult discussions and decisions.
On the bright side, though, 2020 made us realize how fascinating and incredible our communication tools and progress are. We are living in a time where everything is possible from west to east, north to south. We are living in such incredible times, and yet our human communications and interactions are poor. But this is not a lost cause. The year 2021 invited us to pause and reflect on these trying times, and there is hope. As humans, we are all intelligent, we all are great thinkers, or we would not be where we are now. We have made it that far, traveling by air, sea, and earth, exploring other stars and planets, leaving longer, unraveling many mysteries of nature, and advancing medicine. So, as we are thinking about sustainability and living in environment-friendly communities, we will find a way to ingest less Fast Thoughts.
