How many models of the iPhone has there been?
Variants included? 24? 25?
We are Winston Smith drinking Soylent Green, waking up in a Black Mirror adaptation of the Truman Show, rampaging through the set and hitting the fourth wall. We are simulation #19456-fourteen, test subjects for the grad school dissertation of our alien overlord. She is watching us.
Who is watching her, beyond her screen?
We romanticise the extraordinary.
Falling short of extraordinary lives and accomplishments, we aim for and are sold on extraordinary things. It has become a social ritual in this country to go on vacation with a shopping list of transatlantic luxury purchases for acquaintances, colleagues… people whom we don’t particularly care for. Nevertheless this very act is a symbol of status. And it is perfectly fine to trouble an acquaintance to haul back a suitcase of gadgets and clothes and lotions under the guise of making marginal savings, but really to declare: my life is grander than what you’ve seen.
We travel the world and feel shackled, and fuck three strangers in a week of solitude. The problem of a life measured by material satisfaction is that hedonic fulfilment grows with diminishing returns. Homo Sapiens have an unfortunate tendency to immunized ourselves against pleasure. Our paradoxical quest for the immortal amidst the temporary sets us on a futile cycle of escalating cravings and satiation and on and on we go, till we are numb.
What gives texture to desire, is that space between having and being.
A heavy question to think about, then. This relentless march of living: where will you go? No doubt it is a good life to live with earthly amenities and bodily pleasures and textured things. But these are but the foundations upon which we discover the very things that make life worth living.
Sometimes I wonder if life is a matter of defiance. We’re random clumps of stardust scattered from a single point of the primordial universe, arbitrarily settling into that one arrangement – out of all the infinite combinations of matter – which developed a consciousness through which we become aware of ourselves… magical, bipedal apes who fuck for pleasure and hurt from lost love a world away and write poetry to mourn the soul of a waning sun. We are born into a process of dying, and therefore we live to defy against the forces of entropy and decay, inevitable as they may be.
So our consumerist life is in some ways a manifestation of our defiance will gone awry. It’s our biological impulses taken to the extreme – that we live, and we want to live to the brim, and we will break the world and reforge it into an exquisite machine the size of a fist which connects us to the sum of human knowledge, and the whole world will pay a tithe and subscribe to slightly updated version of the machine, year after year, for the rest of their lives.
But if we seek to escape from this Sisyphean treadmill, we must ask what makes its meaningful for life to be worth living.
Hume on his deathbed remarked, “I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire”.
A cheerful death, then, with all its presuppositions, is as good a touchstone as any with which to measure a life.
#00117F 