Most of the great monks, spiritual and scientific thinkers, of the past and present agree on one thing, and it is that it is all pointless. What isn’t pointless is to understand what makes you tick and “follow your heart”. Do what you really want to do. But it seems that it is getting harder by the day – with the development of a million new blogs, a thousand new “must-have” apps, and a hundred new ways to keep in touch with people.
I cannot vouch as to whether distractions are growing only recently (with the growth in technology), or if they have been around since we have. But it seems that these days, we have something to distract us every moment from our own selves. If my blackberry is with me when I’m at the beach, where I’m simply trying to get away from it all – I’m not really away from “it all”, am I? It seems as though we are losing touch with ourselves, and without knowing ourselves, we can hardly know anything that would give us direction, motivation to mold our lives and those of our future generations.
Let’s assume that there were distractions of the mind, and not the technology kind in the past, but people still spent time enough to direct themselves to how they really wanted their life to be. But today, with the corporate lives and capitalist culture, most things are regulated by the desire to earn more or spend less. This is not the way real innovation is done, and neither is it the way to mold lives – because in all honesty, those who can’t take care of themselves will be left to waste. Our most recent experience with our economy is a testament to that. Most corporations do not care about the individual, the bottom line is what matters.
This is going to be even more true in the future unless the world is ruled by spiritual and thought leaders. If that be the case, Our generations, and the generations of our children, grand-children have an even more important need to understand themselves, become literate and educated and be able to think for themselves.
These distractions are great, of course, to pass the time now and then, but before it is too late, we must understand that real growth is needed – and even though it might have its root in technology, it has to be based on our thoughts, needs and requirements. Smartphones, Social Networks (and the like) are great tools, but we wouldn’t stop breathing if these stopped existing. It might make our lives a little bit more tedious, and sometimes even complicated, but we need to understand the real place of such “belongings” in our life and put them in their place.
Such importance is placed in the “time”, for example, but it doesn’t really exist. Time is merely a calculation, a perception accepted by half-a-dozen billion people in this world. If we were to be locked up in a room for a specified amount of time, we wouldn’t be able to tell how long we were in there unless we knew what the specified time was.
And yet people’s lives depend on this – both allegorically and literally – milliseconds can be the reason for life and death, and milliseconds can mean that a million dollars were lost in the financial market which leads to the firing, and the successive falling of a trader’s career. The former, is quite a part of our destiny or luck, if you will, but the latter was created by ourselves, wasn’t it?
Financial Markets are not real. Economies are not real. They are concepts, and concepts cannot be disregarded. But then again, one cannot regard concepts with prime importance. For surely we are human beings first, and traders, or economists, or citizens second, are we not?
Even if we don’t stop breathing with the end of such things as smartphones and social networks and financial networks, we might feel a pang of boredom bite us, but that is only because we really have been taught to 1) look into ourselves to occupy ourselves by thought, and 2) to find less distractive means to simply “be” and not always “do”.
It’s a hard topic to grasp, but I firmly believe that mankind did not evolve to simply do. Just being (with oneself, by oneself, or with others) is a very big aspect of our nature which we seem to ignore.
Life is a game. You either intrinsically understand it, or you don’t. But that’s no reason to not try, right? We are human beings first and everything else that a society gives us next. In our amassing of wealth, fortune, titles, fame, publicity, we tend to forget this. And in that mix, we tend to forget that what we do today will affect us naturally tomorrow.
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