I’m having exams since the last few weeks and trust me, they are no joke! And then we have classes as well along the way, with yesterday being the submission detail for an essay on ‘Is technology making us feel more isolated everyday.’ I finalized and sent my entry 2 minutes before 12 AM, spoke a bit with Hamza, and died midway of the conversation out of exhaustion. I’ve just woken up and before I rush to revise organic chem, I need to post this essay for all of you to read and let me know what you think about it.
On a Tuesday afternoon, one of my students called me. Haris, who’s got a sense of humour so dark it puts KESC* to shame for its constant power failures, was reluctant to talk to me. ‘Sulaiman bhai,’ he paused. ‘I don’t think I can go through the quarantine without anyone to talk to.’
For a moment, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He wanted me to somehow agree to his idea that ‘pursuing a relationship would make him feel less lonely’ and he justified his argument by saying that ‘it would be like pursuing a 2-month internship; nothing serious!’
You’ve probably understood where I’m going with this. We’ve all been lonely and we’ve all entertained the idea that someone else would come and take us out of this misery. Before, we chased people on horses. Now, we chase them on dating apps and social networks. Technology has made this pursuit a little easier, and yet we often conclude that it is the cause of our isolation; that somehow our dependence on our gadgets have left within us nihilistic morbidity where life outside the domain of handheld screens does not exist.
This black and white view of the world never works. Without a paradigm shift, there will always be a conflict in our judgement and experience of the world around us. Guru Parthik shares a beautiful thought: ‘The greatest illusion of this world is the illusion of separation. The things you think are separate and different are usually one and the same.’
When I close my eyes and think about discussing the link between technology and isolation, I see a huge crowd of anti-vaxxers hailing from rural Arkansas, marching with placards. Their main goal is to pressurize the government to ban the use of electronic gadgets.
For some, this could be true. Imagine a farmer in rural Punjab who’s looking forward to meeting his son but instead, gets a WhatsApp video call from him. The son is not coming home. At the end of the call, the son sends a big flashing heart with an ‘I miss you dad.” *insert weeping smiley*. The farmer at this moment has felt the brunt of being isolated from his loved one at the hands of technology. But is it really because of technology?
Our digital world, which I’d like to rebrand as ‘Digiverse’, has been slowly replacing our human connections. We’ve got our smart devices acting as our moms and secretaries: planning meetings, reserving plane tickets, booking seats at a restaurant, hailing a cab, even allowing us to maintain long-distance relationships by translating human intimacy into pixelated pleasure. Unfortunately, like every other language, not everything can be translated into the way it was meant to be. When that happens, the message gets convoluted into something which was not meant to exist in the first place.
Almost ten years ago, an online video game, League of Legends, connected me to people beyond the borders of my country. It was something that I couldn’t have achieved the way I spend my life – in solitude. We call ourselves introverts and for us, isolation is the norm. Yet our need to be loved and connected remains a constant which gets us manipulated and exploited on our digital playgrounds where we hang out most of the day. An example of these digital social bars are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Orkut. If you don’t know the latter two, you’re too young to be judging the worth of this essay!
Social networks have increased human interaction ten folds, and dating apps are making things even more gullible by propagating instantaneous gratification. Back then, people put effort into relationships. Today, we simply swipe right and a few lines of ‘I love you’ get us in another person’s bed. The next day, we walk away as strangers. Our greed for love has driven us mad as we chase people in hopes that they would give us the things we need to give ourselves. In our need for intimacy, we’ve ended up isolating ourselves even more from the idea of what real connection feels like.
But we still choose to blame machines for our heartbreaks and loneliness. We blame our cellphones for our constant connectivity, blame our social networks for leeching away our time, blame our workplaces for communicating through emails after we’re done for the day. We occupy ourselves with meaningless interactions and continuous distractions to a point that by the time our day ends, we simply fall asleep out of exhaustion and then we wonder, where did our time go?
We are constantly chasing distractions in hopes that we won’t have to face ourselves. It is we who have developed these gadgets trying to sate our hunger for connection with instant messaging. Yet we forget that technology is but a tool. What we do with it holds the actual meaning. And this is where we fall prey to the corruption in our society. We would do anything but take responsibility for our actions.
Earlier, we used to blame people: children, friends, family members. We still do, but in addition to that, we now blame the very tools we invented for making our lives easier. Our phones are not the cause of addiction, it’s our lack of self-discipline; dating apps are not the cause of a self-deprecating society, it’s our addiction to instant gratification; lack of things to do is not the cause of our boredom but our lack of introspection and the desire to work on ourselves and become better than what we were yesterday. Our inability to connect with ourselves is the real reason we’re deprived of the very love we seek from others.
We have isolated ourselves from each other by substituting our lives with ‘goodies.’ I call these things goodies because they make us feel good. We feel like we’re doing something important, something good, but in reality, we’re just wasting our lives, placing the blame of everything wrong in this world, on the universe, and going back to sleep with a face that says, ‘I hate my life because I’m so lonely!’
KESC is the power division of our city which reads as Karachi Electric Supply Corporation when not abbreviated.
Unwritten 