Looking Away: How We are Still Unhappy With Everything We Can Have (With an Original Artwork)

The last couple of days we have lost all internet connections and telephone lines. (Yes in South Africa we still use landlines.) I am currently on my cellphone internet, trying to post something without losing all of my data. (Yes in South Africa data is very expensive.) This got me thinking about how dependent we are on the internet for our lives to function normally. We are so connected to everything from the news to friends to steemit and the crypto market etc. I am constantly on my phone, waiting for emails, waiting for person x to call me. How did our lives become like this? We are controlled by a simple cell phone.

For a moment close your eyes and think about a thousand years ago. It is almost not possible because of the way we changed as a society and technologically. We have cars to drive us to a place where we want to go, we have a phone to connect to the internet to talk to someone more than 10 000 kilometres away from us. We are slaves to technology. But this is not all bad. We have the world at our fingertips. We can learn things our parents would never know. We can read books that would never have been published previously. We can look at art that would have been laughed out of the gallery.

We can lose this all in an instant. The internet can crash (for some bizarre reason). We can fall victim to some brutal leadership that takes over. Our lives can be thrown out of proportion into chaos in an instant. This can lead to two things (both positive): firstly, this will help us to appreciate things as they are at the present moment, but secondly, this will help us also to do things more often. If we are faced with the idea of our own death, we will do things we would never have done. If you hear that you will die tomorrow you will do the things you would have wanted to do, you will also appreciate the taste, the sight, the feeling of everything you have not.

With my loss of internet, I have done so much. I have baked bread, I sold the bread, I did some DIY projects around the house with my father, I drank some expensive whisky looking at the start. I started to live, but I also felt disconnected. I think living without the internet is a good thing for a certain amount of time, but we are so connected that living without it almost feels unnatural. We are changing as humans. We are more connected (even when it feels like the opposite). We are connected in some weird ways through the internet. It is not like people speaking, but their presence and art speaking. At this moment I am drinking some whisky, thinking about the future that may not realise and feeling sad that we would never know how it felt like to live without the internet.