michaelsharrington (Hridayam)

Most of the Western world is deluded and consumed by the ever growing array of tech devices. It makes you long for the simple days of TV. As if that mind control device wasn’t enough. Now people are so obsessed and addicted to the vast array of ‘techy toys’ that they will jaywalk across a busy commercial intersection, head down, their will surrendered to Mr. Droid or I-Guy, without even realizing they are crossing the street. They will drive as if they were multitasking at the office. In every single activity they participate, the tech baby is with them. It is not their child; they are its child. The e-baby is the anti-pacifier of the new age. Instead of suck-suck-suck, drool-drool, the little toddler stimulates the mind to keep consuming, to keep recreating itself. It feeds this obsessive-compulsive disorder society, based on the belief that ‘I must continue, stay busy, keep moving, etc.’ Exploitation of this fact reaches into every corner of the tech world.

We are having fabricated robotic communication; it’s me against the machine but I’m better, or we participate in illusory conversations with entities we have never met face-to-face. We assume and project, formulate an idealism based on their picture, profile, game-playing ability or postings. We believe that the images and writings we send back and forth are real. We are talking to an appearance on some screen, feigning some kind of connection. Often the person we are typing back and forth with isn’t even the same person as the picture image listed on their site. They have created a stealth identity online and play themselves off as some handsome athletic guy or cute country girl. Maybe they might sit on the pulpit portraying the spiritually enlightened, religiously-infused teacher, dispensing wisdom for a price—loaded with sex appeal and other textbook varieties of what most people would consider the ‘ideal’.

The next time your tech-child picks you up, see that an illusory sense of ‘me’ is avoiding something, wants to be pacified, put into a stupor to deflect feelings or avoid facing some aspect of life. And that’s okay, but it’s nice to realize this. A day might come when suddenly your little inner tech toy child—some call it the mind—will no longer need to hold you close. You’ll be able to do that yourself.