What was left of my Enlightenment vision is making water. The idea that we are inexorably “evolving” has been questioned for a long time, but I confess that it still harbored some illusion. My mistake was to elevate technology to a level of importance it doesn’t deserve. It’s not about evaluating the “cost-benefit”, it’s something deeper than accounting can reach. I am referring to questions inaccessible to algorithms, which dialogue with our affections and subjectivities and which, let’s face it, is what matters in life: what is not apparent, but which touches us in depth. And, in that sense, what is more important in this life than the quality of the relationships we are capable of building?
It is not news that we are gregarious beings, that we need each other and that this characteristic has made us reach the top of the food chain in a very short time; nor that it has bred an arrogance that is blinding us to the risks we face as a species. What has gone unnoticed is that, as we reduce the quality of relationships, we put our very existence at risk. We are losing quality, deceived by the quantity of relationships and the brevity of time devoted to them. We just go back in time a little.
Many of you will remember that we visited relatives and friends without notice. Surprise was part of the process, the release of adrenaline that stimulated confidences, eye contact, the exchange of affection. The combination of the gesture of searching with the attention and time devoted was capable of untying knots from existence and almost deciphering the universe.
A short time later, the surprise visit fell into disuse and we began to ask permission to visit. It was as if we needed a visa in a fraternal passport to authorize the meeting. We then lost a little of the spark, although we continued seeing each other, touching each other and feeding our memory of skin: intangible things.
The next step was when we abandoned the meeting and adopted the telephone conversation. On the basis of the voice, we tried to replace the face-to-face meeting and, deceived by poor equations that related time savings to greater productivity, we accepted the tavern philosophy: “Time is money, earn money by not wasting time”. We don’t save money or time and we resort more and more to psychotropic drugs in the search to fill the void, the great sertão that inhabits us, in the tireless search for a path that relieves us.
Soon after, we started asking, via messages, if we could call: can you talk? The time had come for the need for authorization for the phone call. Gradually the conversations become rarer and are replaced by messages. The surprise of the phone call is no longer allowed: the bina announces who is calling and now the message seeks to schedule the speech.
It doesn’t take long and the messages start to shorten, being limited to a certain number of characters. A tolerable limit of characters is agreed and Twitter sets the tone by assuming a magic number: 140. Transmit everything you want, summarize what you think, summarize your feelings in 140 characters.
At the same time, audio messages gain strength under the argument of practicality and time saving. And we stopped exercising writing, a process that requires reflection on content, form and way of expressing what we feel. And we started listening to messages at double the speed —after all (you guessed it), time is money.
What is certain is that, one way or another, resigned to trying to convey what we think through messages, we write subordinate to these codes that limit us. It was then that, after a damned effort to try to summarize what I felt and the dilemma I was going through in a text that was a little longer than the “norms” allow, I received a ❤️ in response. That’s when I cried. Because deep down I would have liked to have received a sympathetic look, a tight hug, a voice that consoled me or an explicit message of support or affection. But I received a little heart, cute, but lonely, mute, silent, incapable of realizing the dimension of the feelings involved.
The history of relationships has followed a strange path, one that separates us more than unites us, and its trajectory has an enormous impact on our well-being. Without realizing it, by simplifying we are complicating life, getting tangled up in issues that we cannot reach in the short term, but that will affect us right there in the future. The lack of willingness to read and write reduces repertoire, capacity for reflection and criticism, paving the way for misinformation that has greatly impacted our lives.
And from technology to technology, we delude ourselves with our ability to create and innovate, without realizing that we are being sucked into the trap of time and that the technologies that shine our ego are the same ones that are reducing what is most expensive and rare: our ability to understand the other through meeting, exchanging, looking, listening, smelling and touching.
I have worked as a journalist for over 10 years, and my work has been featured on many different news websites. I am also an author, and my work has been published in several books. I specialize in opinion writing, and I often write about current events and controversial topics. I am a very well-rounded writer, and I have a lot of experience in different areas of journalism. I am a very hard worker, and I am always willing to put in the extra effort to get the job done.
