Coping with Our Changing Times: The Weirdness of the Everyday (With Original Photographs)

It has been two weeks since our local internet and landline connections have been cut off. The funny part is that it is only our home. The problem is that the company that does the landline and ADSL-line is a monopoly in South Africa. They are the only company that has ADSL and telephone lines. You cannot switch companies, because there is only one. So, we are stuck in this limbo offline world for a couple of days until the official holiday is over. I can luckily connect via my cell phone to post now and then, it is not ideal and very expensive.

This got me thinking, as in the previous post, about how dependent our world is on the internet. Or stated differently, how dependent our everyday functioning is on the internet working. You can do nothing really without connecting to the internet. All your money is tied, your daily activities are tied, your knowing what is going on around you is all tied to the internet. But this dependence on the internet is not that weird at all. Everyday life is the weird part. The fact that we can adapt to any situation, but with the internet and our new connected life the everyday functioned in the background. We believed in the illusion (or still believe) that our lives are connected and depends on the internet (this is true in some sense), but the every day things still linger and simmer in the pot of real (unconnected) life.

Take for example the rose images I am using in this post. Put under different light, taken from a different angle, cropping a bit, we sit with a new image that does not resemble real life in a sense. The images may look fake, it may not even look like a rose. This is due to the fact that I put it in a new context, or in a new light. When you take something you are so used to and put it in a new place or light, it may be a totally different thing. (More formally, it is called ostranenie, the act of enhancing the every day and common things by placing it in a new and unfamiliar way.)

Sometimes when I wake in the morning I need to re-orientate myself, I need to confirm to myself the fact that I woke up in this bed on the planet in the era. Things are moving so quickly that you cannot quick enough. Life is changing every day; our era and cultures are changing quicker than ever. Some time in the future we will not know our own culture today. We are metamorphosing into something we are not familiar with. A 100 years ago we would still have killed people who did not conform to our norms, now we need to adopt the culture of globalisation. We can no longer go against the norm of this global culture we are turning into. This may be good, this may be bad. We don’t know because it has never happened in the history of the human race.

It is on the eve of the first day of 2018 that I am posting this. This year will be different. We as a global culture can rise up against everything that is classified as the norm, or everything can go on as the previous year. It is just another day on planet earth. The one thing that will not change is this weirdness of every day life that we cannot avoid.