Please Be Grateful and Keep Scrolling

Somewhere between the reels and the affirmations, your real life went missing

It is easy to fall for the “I should be grateful” trap.

The more content I go through, the more I notice the Great Huge Trap of Being Grateful. The mighty content. Actually, it is no longer only a news stream. It is becoming the new everything. A few years ago I thought total virtual reality would take over, grab our souls, and we would willingly leave our tired, slowly rotting bodies behind. I remember watching Cronenberg’s eXistenZ years ago and thinking, “Oh yeah, baby. Now we are going somewhere.” I was a heavy gamer back then, playing scary first person games in a dark room with big headphones over my ears, completely isolating myself from surrounding reality. I was totally immersed. So watching a film about a new game, where the player plugs the console straight into their own spinal cord, was ultra exciting. You connect yourself in one second and poof, you are in a game so real it is impossible to tell the difference. I wanted it badly. I was waiting for it, wondering whether it would be possible in my lifetime. Not to become immortal by uploading myself to some cloud. Just to play a game. Just one game, I hoped. But let me come back to the beginning.

We changed as a species. We changed so much during the past decade or two that it is partly exhilarating and partly scary as fuck. We are accelerating, evolution wise, to a point that would make Charles Darwin blush. The thing is, we do not even need a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from the real world. Social media, or socials, or whatever you want to call it, or whatever they want you to call it, altered us in no time. The funny part is, the process is not over yet. No need for spinal cord inserts. We have little smartphones and we are already gone. Just staring into a small black glass seems to be enough to take our souls away. We moved into the digital world. We are all digital creators. The world has never been more creative.

And here, in this digital world, there are trends, local wisdoms, and new proverbs. My granny used to give me her local wisdom. Now we have digital grannies, sages, hustlers, and influencers, and they are, believe it or not, influencing us. I have noticed that some online wisdoms are almost universal. “I should be grateful” is one of them. Just be grateful for what you have. Wouldn’t that be the clever thing to do, since you have more than enough compared with the Middle Ages. True. We should be grateful for our lives. I am not denying that. What I am trying to say is this: we have consumed so much content that we have lost the thread. We think we are still thinking for ourselves, but that is no longer really the case. Our lives are now so influenced that we do not know whether we are still alive or already dead. We are functioning. Machines function too. We are constantly trying to get ahead, whatever that means. Simple being is becoming unavailable to us. Staring at the sky would be considered abnormal, weird. It would look like someone was ungluing themselves from reality. Yet hordes of humans staring into a black mirror and tapping on it have been normalised.

But again, back to the beginning. Maybe this time I will get to the point. The point is, there is no point in “I should be grateful” for something you do not even know anymore. You have swum in the digital ocean for so long that you do not even know who you are anymore, let alone what to be grateful for. There is no point in being grateful for someone else’s life. Your life is no longer yours. It has been influenced to the point of no return. You have reached the event horizon, so beware of your own soul. There is no point in repeating someone else’s affirmations and looping yourself inside reels and whatever else. First, maybe reconnect with yourself. Feel the blood circulating through your veins, your heart beating, breathing happening without your control. There is no point in controlling everything. Life does not work like that. The universe moves in the most playful way. Supernovas explode. Suns die. Planets spin effortlessly. Trees grow and nobody tells them to do so. Rivers flow with no purpose. Birds sing while no one is recording. Nobody even knows how life started and still, it is a rare beauty. You and I are only an extremely small part of that, and our window is narrow. Let’s leave forced gratitude to the side. Let’s drop the seriousness for a moment, together with our little purpose, whatever we think it is. You are not special, and you are very special too. Your life is brief and rare, and everything is heading towards an end. A short trip. Yet how exciting it can be, if you allow it.