We live in Fantasyland. Everyone is always on their phones. And its taking us further and further away from reality. And truth.
Think about what Instagram is. Snapshots of reality. Pictures of your friends, family, or celebrities in the real world. You get the tiniest bit of it. A single frame or a fifteen-second video. They are only a part of your life because you chose them over the present moment. You chose someone else’s life over your own.
But it’s not only that. It’s not like you looked up in a restaurant at the couple next to you. From there, it’s your perspective of their reality. But on social media, you get their perspective of their reality. What they think their life is like or what they want you to think their life is like.
My wife and I watched the Joker the other night. I couldn’t stop thinking this is a movie based on a comic book. If it was a play, there would at least be real people in front of me. I am watching a screen. Pixels of actors pretending to be people who never actually existed.
I have friends that share Twitch feeds on Facebook. If you don’t know, this is a place where you can watch people play video games online. And it’s popular.
First off, the video game itself does not actually exist in the real world. It never did. It started as an idea in someone’s mind, and ended up on a disk in your console. And your interactions are on a server who knows where.
Just in case that is not removed enough from reality, you can watch people play instead of actually playing it. Think about a memory of you walking your dog. Now imagine me watching a video of you walking your dog, if you and your dog both never existed.
I guess you could say that what is real is your thoughts. So in engaging in these things, you could share experiences with real people. If your mind is on the same thing, you shared something, right?
Remember ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If thinking is adequate to know that we exist in reality, we have to assume that thoughts exist in the same reality.
The problem with this is the fact that if thoughts are the only things that anchor these things to reality, how do you distinguish between two different thoughts of killing someone-one in a game and one in real life? You have to remember that the game has no anchor in reality. No one actually dies.
If thinking of killing people is OK, but killing people is not, why should we practice thinking of killing people? Is it possible to kill someone without thinking of killing them first?
But wait, the people you kill online are actually anchored in reality. They are other people like you. So it’s more like killing real people in your dreams.
So if reality has any value, if truth has any worth, put down your phone for a minute and be present in your own life. Put down your controller and go do something with your friends, instead of killing them in dreamland. You’re the main character in your own movie, and you write the script.
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