Let’s get real and connected to the simple life

Is there such a thing as information overload? Today, not only do we keep up with the facts that help us earn our bread and butter, we need to access a vast amount of info to do it that much better. Better bread. Better butter. The blame lands squarely on social media, of course, the favourite means of entertainment, keeping up, connecting, studying, working, backbiting, slandering there is. For many people there is a sense that they need to catch up with everything that’s going on. But not too long ago, if you met up, say at a party, did you catch up with each party princess or frog prince?

Was there the bandwidth to devote enough time to each individual? I may be an outlier here, but I think one could spend meaningful time with one or two, at most. That would make a satisfying evening out for me, while basking in the warm glow of friendship and camaraderie in a shared space. And hopefully, good food to wash down the conversation with.

But the slight edge of hysteria with which large numbers (I can’t condemn everybody — then you wouldn’t get through this op-ed piece) attempt to connect with the world is getting frankly, terrifying. And it’s taking the mickey out of some of the populace.

You meet people more often now, who want to do some sort of detox — walking over the mountains in Georgia or some such, where you’d need to chuck your phone into a backpack and actually sit on the edge of a meadow. Peer at some strange insect on a blade of grass and expunge it into oblivion before it met some tasty skin. Real things like that, that are becoming an exception instead of the alt-left universe that we live in that is our everyday, every breathing moment reality.

You meet people more often now, who want to do some sort of detox — walking over the mountains in Georgia or some such, where you’d need to chuck your phone into a backpack and actually sit on the edge of a meadow

Through that you allow yourself to think longingly that you should ‘escape’ to the fjords of Scandinavia, yurts of Mongolia, breathtaking Bhutan, or walk the streets of ancient Ephesus. Underlining the desperation is the fear that things will change and you will not be able to participate in a pristine reality. Or is it the fear that we have cauterised the possibility of having that kind of simplicity in our lives? It becomes a compartment in our brain that we hope to access at some point in the future. Right now? Deadline looming.

That kind of compartmentalisation is actually part of the reason that people are not ‘touched’ by stories or images of war and suffering. It’s not just that you are inured to the suffering — it possibly is a way for the brain to protect itself by shutting down and not allowing more anguish through. Unfortunately, it makes us complicit in that situation because we don’t speak up. Remember John F. Kennedy’s “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” We do nothing because despite all the information hurtling at us from light years away, we feel helpless and unable to move, deer-in-thelights kind of confusion.

Forget the office — I find it difficult to navigate a new hypermart for my weekly shopping. Discovering where everything is, takes time when that everything means thousands of brands that I need to navigate through. I could do that in St Petersburg because as a tourist, scouting for smoked salmon or interesting cheese was the limit of my excursion. Which is why a tiny store in the mountains where I can find batteries for a flashlight is wonderful. Smoked salmon is nowhere in my range of expectations.

harveena@khaleejtimes.com