Only in a hashtag TikTok world could the abbreviated alphabet emoji language of texting be considered a form of conversation. This is the short-hand time management of saving time to waste time, where we’re stupidly staring at our smartphones for hours. It’s the curated spectator lifestyle our high-definition screens afford us – allowing our minds to be anywhere else but here. It flattens everything out so neatly into a bite-sized predigested pabulum so that our short attention spans will be able to absorb it, with the least amount of cognition. So ironically, we’ve allowed the shiny objects of technology that promise to improve our lives, to captivate us with the perverse banality of the lowest common denominator – a life lived in low resolution.
It’s as if we’ve chosen to return to the shadow images of Plato’s Cave – to the blissful passive ignorance of the easily explainable world we’d prefer to live in. It’s not that the technology is bad – but rather, it’s the choices technology presents us with . . . as if we were wise enough to know what it was that we were actually choosing. But when our default setting is to seek distraction and amusement, within a culture that incentivizes such superficiality at every turn – our reflex choice will almost always be reductively happy to have technology deliver to us, more of the same . . . without ever having to leave the cave.
I suppose you could say this is just the current shape of our post-modern world, disillusioned by the broken promises of modernity, learning to accept the pointless absurdity of diminishing returns, pretending we can simply pronounce meaning into existence…against the deafening silence of an ambivalent material universe. A universe, by its sheer enormity reminding us of how incredibly small and insignificant we are . . . an uncomfortable truth we’d rather hold in abstraction. So in order for our self-existing narrative to survive, we must shrink the infinite until it fits inside of the finite, drained of its transcendence, where we can imagine ourselves to be the arbiter of its value.
Sartre and Camus pronounced the universe to be absurd — as if they could make such a determination from their finite point of view. Nietzsche pronounced God dead – as if saying the words could somehow make them true. Descartes proclaimed “I think therefore I am” and Rousseau pronounced the “authentic self” to be the highest value – each assuming that the value of “self” could somehow be determined by the finite self . . . as if such thinking weren’t conspicuously circular. When we deny the existence of a transcendent God — meaning, purpose, and significance become pixelated words . . . lost in the low resolution of the vanity and hubris of our finite perception of value.
But intuitively we know that without meaning, purpose, and significance life becomes nothing more than a cruel and pointless subsistence . . . and no amount of distraction and amusement can assuage the dark foreboding of meaninglessness. So yes, we intuitively know that there is supposed to be a point to life – a high-definition life, in full harmony with the design of creation. A life reconciled to God, the transcendent source of all that exists. A life defined by love, where truth and beauty provide light and dimension to every moment – each moment precious and rare, held in the hands of our savior, Jesus Christ . . . for he is the first and last Word of all creation.
Sometimes it’s best to return to the basics . . .
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