It has been about two weeks since my last blog. I was deliberating about what topic to write about - the ongoing crisis in Syria/ Libya/ every corner of the Arab world, the debacle with the Gaza flotilla stuck in Greece, the Greek financial crisis, the looming Portuguese financial crisis, even a rave about how Ferrari finally won a Grand Prix again yesterday...
And then I logged onto Blogger.
And what do I find? A whole new lay-out, a whole new look, new buttons to figure out, everything unfamiliar to me yet again and a whole new bloody reason to get annoyed by yet another turn on this infernal Road from (or to?) Hell known as the Information Age.
Why this need for CONSTANT change in this day and age? Yes, I know it's petty of me and it's just a 'new look' Blogger and hardly life-ending stuff, so what's the big deal, right? It isn't a big deal, in and of itself, of course. But what it is is yet another new quirk, another new kink in the already destabilizing world that is Technology [drum roll]. Cellphones, Internet, apps (schmapps, for all I care), even a simple blogging site - this constant state of flux that never allows one to be at ease, to be in a comfort zone, to have instant recognition.
Just as I get used to a certain layout and way to get around Windows, so it changes. Just as I get used to a certain version of name-your-pick-of-annoying-must-have-utterly-essential-software, so it changes. Change, change, bloody change. Incessantly.
I hate this constant, neverending need of this often vile, increasingly 'organic' thing called Technology [drum roll ad nauseam] to keep updating, to keep changing, to keep altering, to keep reinventing itself that with which I have become familiar and, yes, comfortable.
It's like this modern era, beholden as it is to Technology, is Sybil with seven different personalities. And that's all seven personalities restless and reinventing themselves every other week. Demented as all hell.
I find myself yearning ever more and more for a time when things don't need to constantly change just to prove their worth or their staying power. And that includes simply how a bloody blog template works. Because I honestly find this relentless chopping and changing exhausting - and so futile.
Is this the mental 'environment' that advocates like Adbusters talk about and contend that we are having violated in this modern 'information' era? That feeling of having your mental space bombarded by so many stupid little changes and images and other clutter that actually add very little, if any, real value to one's life or wellbeing?
I have lived in five different countries and even more different cities, get itchy if I have to commit to a gym membership for more than a year, get bored by routine a trifle easily and can hardly be called averse to change in my life. I know change can be a good thing, even a great thing.
But sometimes change that looks different but actually means just more of the same thing is change that can irk and irritate and ultimately even alienate. It's not change for the better, but merely change for the sake of change.
This empty, soulless change with multiple personality disorder is the epitome of our desperate, perpetually adolescent age - an age that is never content with what is, is constantly having to re-invent itself and that assumes anything new and revamped simply has to be a good thing. Like, it has to be, right?
This empty, soulless change is Dorothy perpetually looking over that rainbow and always wishing it'll be better some day. Pity Dorothy.
Do you get my point?
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