When I was a teenager I read a book called, 'Magician' by Raymond E. Feist. There was a part in the book where Milamber, the magician, was in basic magic school training that resonated with me, and came to mind recently.

The scene was that he was given a task to complete which was to hammer a nail through a thick woollen fabric until it fell to the floor, where he would then pick it up and repeat the process. Day in and day out he did what was instructed until one day, he realised the futility of the exercise, and walked out of the room. He was ready to begin.

For many of us, this is life. Day in and day out we beat our heads against a wall thinking that what we do is important, that it matters and has meaning yet, we rarely stop to realise the futility of our actions. 

It is very possible that the life that we lead has a lot less significance than we are led to believe or, perhaps we hope it has. When looking at the enormity of the universe itself, it is highly unlikely that humanity is overly important in the grand scheme of things and if history repeats, eventually, we too will go the way of the dinosaurs.

For many, the thought of this is defeating as it gives the impression that there is no point to do anything, perhaps other than live a hedonistic lifestyle where pleasure is the core driver or, maybe just end it right here and now since if there is no point to life, there is also no significance in death.

I take a different view in this however as I think that what we choose to do is supremely important, even if it is only important to us in this very moment. But, this doesn't mean that it is not going to effect the next moment we live and a life, as long or short as it may be, is a series of moments that end with death. 

Yes, we all end up at the same place but does it matter how we get there? Not really but to the experience of the individual while alive, the moment is the only thing experienced and it is the only part of life that can be lived. To me, this means that to live fully, I have to pay attention to the moment in which I am living.

Our lives are increasingly running on automatic pilot as culture, technology and our actions push us to form habits that relinquish our agency to an authority. The controller may be a government, or a philosophy, or it could be the habits we have created in ourselves but, nonetheless, automatic actions become the norm.

I write about wasting time often but in actuality, perhaps time is the wrong measurement as in the now moment, the only moment, time is no relevant. Perhaps potential is a better indicator of what is going on in the moment and how effective we are 'living' this life that leads us to an inevitable end.

In any given moment, we each have some amount of potential to use to affect our environment, to influence the people around us, to make changes to our behaviours. Many of us are increasingly leaving how we use our potential in the hands of others. Generally this is a form of centralised authority who absorbs our energy, whether it be our time, attention or money.

Think about spending an hour watching something on Netflix that has little personal value, has nothing useful other than maybe some mindless space. Think about the 100 million other people watching the same thing. 100 million hours evaporated from people's immediate potential. 100 million hours that the group can never get back, potential lost in mindless.

It is a hijacking of the collective to create a botnet of resource miners. What they are mining is us, our potential and what we could otherwise do with it. Our resources are being bled, resources that could otherwise be used to process and create who knows what. And this happens in hundreds or thousands of micro events and ways each day.

Each individual action following the centralised content and direction becomes a massive collective bowing down to all manner of authority. Governments and corporations may lead the pack, but they are not alone. We all want to be free yet, we seem to all be doing the same things. Millions of us, hundreds of millions of us at times.

Our potential to change our behaviours, affect our moment, to live this life, are being restricted because we have chosen to mindlessly follow the engaging content provided by the conglomerates. Content that rarely inspires us to do differently. They do not want us to do differently unless what we are doing now is not beneficial for their bottom line, whether they are collecting money or power. Generally, these things go hand in hand anyway.

They are continually finding new and innovative ways to give us a nail and get us to hammer it endlessly through the wool until we get bored, and then they change the colour of the wool. New ways to keep us engaged in mindless.

I was handed an interesting article about YouTube content for children which highlights the absurdity and harmful nature of what is fed to the people who are meant to be the future. Their potential is being absorbed and withdrawn at an ever-increasing rate, earlier and earlier in the lifecycle.

Last night, I was asked when it was time to stop wasting time. The better question is when it is time to stop wasting potential? When is it time to stop being mined for our resources and start using them to create a life that has meaning. It may only have meaning for us as an individual but, perhaps that is enough. Is it time to put the nail they hand us through something other than meaningless wool?

Taraz
[ a steemit original ]

The article I mentioned courtesy of @acidyo : https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2