Look Up.
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We are being conditioned, a slow burn out from presence and patience.
Journey with me…
There was once a time of newspapers, magazines, books, and phones hardwired to the land with bulky answering machines where we would excitedly arrive home to press play. There were boxy televisions with scheduled shows and minute long commercials, and VCR’s for recording our favorites that aired just once a week or maybe more. And funny looking car phones, flip phones and pagers with codes we’d use to leave quick notes to one another.
The internet went from a slow breathing dial, a precision of noises, that some of us can still hear in our body’s memory today. We would wait patiently for the connection with nothing else to do but stare into the blank screen, out the window at the simplicity of Nature or read a printed hand held literature of some sort. Interactive educational games, with moving cursers and blinking dots were interesting — Oregon Trail anyone? The progression to emails opened a channel to something new, an effective or efficient communication tool in a ramping busier world.
Then comes social media.
MySpace intrigued the senses with music and finding online connections with others through shared artistic interests. We went from creative hours, and I do mean hours, of making and crafting uniquely designed mixes of our songs in tapes and cd’s for our friends to a more instant “click, tap, share”.
Enter Facebook. At first a writer heavy forum to explore ourselves, to share our lives, with those we’ve added as friends depicting who can see what we share. A cathartic journal entry for many of us, it became a place to market or pry into another’s life, keeping a “safe” distance behind closed doors in our rooms, in our homes, alone.
Another world of social interaction beyond our face to face reality began to develop within our minds — and our nervous systems.
A thought or a feeling, something to emote, and we blast it away. A place to go to, unload, to get a hit of others and what they’re doing, all behind cyber walls, without eye contact, without the vibrational pulse that comes from our physical heart in person.
And thus, a new notion of “safe” slowly seeped into our collective conscious.
Oh, hello Instagram.
Hello, pictures. Hello, instant photo capturing.
Hello, less words, more images.
Hello, scroll.
Scroll.
Scroll.
Scroll.
How many images can you see in a “session”?
How many “sessions”, how many hits of the gram a day can you get?
It’s just pictures. It’s just art. It’s just…
…but it is more.
More content to take in and faster. More reasons to intervene in a moment of life, on a hike, at dinner, in conversation, to capture on our phones and post.
And now, all of a sudden,
two worlds at once,
two conversations at once
— one with an actual person and one online with thousands of people.
Then, the cousin or sister, let’s just say the relative, TicTok, emerges with short blast of content. Then Twitter. Or did Twitter come first. Does it matter?
More to take in.
More to share. More Now. More Instant.
More filling our minds. More to consume. More to digest.
Scroll.
Scroll.
Scroll.
Alas, it wasn’t enough.
Like all substances, it’s never about the “thing”.
Gotta keep ‘em entertained.
Well, hello, less than a minute stories.
Easy access to skip, tap, swipe, to get to the next “best thing”.
Hit.
Get another hit.
Didn’t like that one.
Tap.
Scroll.
Swipe.
Tap.
Maybe pause here for a read or a reroute to an actual weblink article.
Then, Return.
Hit. Scroll. Swipe. Tap. Repeat.
Another hook — Hello, Reels. These creative one minute clips to pour ourselves and our time into, adding in music and captions and our own flare to share ourselves, our content, our whimsy, our message.
To keep up with the algorithms of the game — I mean gram — stealing slabs of our precious human time to grow a following, gain likes, more reach, to fill our classes, our workshops, retreats, to sell our books, our vision — to be Seen.
But do we feel Seen?
Hit. Scroll. Swipe. Tap. Repeat.
Hit. Scroll. Swipe. Tap. Repeat.
A pattern emerges in the brain.
The rush of dopamine, the hit, with each return.
We pick up our phones to check an email and find 10, 20, 30 minutes has gone by, only to put our phones down having forgotten to read the email.
Our phones are more attached to our bodies, an extension of us now. We tell ourselves it’s for safety. We tell ourselves it’s for that email or text, to keep track of time, to snap photos.
The excuses we make are creative, yet endless.
We tell ourselves what we want to hear for to really see this relationship to our little hand held computers illuminates the epidemic of its addictive process.
Where did the art of being go, of stillness go?
Of boredom, of mind wander?
Hit.
Scroll.
Swipe.
Tap.
Repeat.
Hit.
Scroll.
Swipe.
Tap.
Repeat.
Hello.
Hello, you.
You, magnificent energetic, alchemical, radiant being,
Look Up.
Look Up.
You might be missing the present of this human life.
Inquiry:
I wonder, how may the normalized positioning of social media and phone addiction impact emotional maturity and personal accountability?
Compassionately curious comments welcome.
Thank you for reading Kristina Renée x Medicine for the Soul, and allowing me the opportunity to serve you. If you know others who would benefit from reading this, please don't keep it to yourself - spread the word! You may click the “heart” button, leave a comment or restack so more people can discover whole-hearted, loving, learning and living in action.
Take care of you.
Take care of one another.
Much Love,
Kristina Renée
