Content-ified

These are interesting times. While our lives become increasingly complex and the variables that affect our actions pile up by the day, it is easy to understand why we find ourselves uncontrollably driven by circumstances around us. Very often, I spend my time doing something that I feel like doing and is not what I desire to be doing. The question is not about productivity related to a certain action performed by a human, it is rather about the action itself. Why is there a gap between what we desire to do and what we happen to do? I am no motivational speaker and more often than not, I do not have answers to pertinent questions of the day. But as I have learnt recently, the answers to a lot of our questions lie in our willingness to take time, map a cause-effect chain, and intelligibly visualize why what happens, happens. 

Let us get into the act. You have just had a relaxed and lazy weekend. Monday morning is greeting you with bright sunshine as you wake up. You stretch yourself and pick up your phone right when you decide to open your eyes. Within a minute after you wake up, you glance at your notifications - friend requests, reminders, events, emails, news headlines and text messages, all at once. You do this so ritualistically that the movements are a part of your muscle memory. As you walk into the bathroom, your mind is populated with memories related to the notifications you just read. As you turn on the shower, you are either pondering over something that didn't go as well as you wanted it to or something that you are afraid wouldn't. The day goes on and you are never too far away from your notifications because you've got high-speed internet and Android 8.1 running on your flagship mobile phone with 6GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 845 processor - basically, scrolling through your feed and consuming content is ridiculously fast and plain easy.

The notification light on our smartphones does what placing deliciously cooked food in front of our eyes when we are starving does. We must consume it. Not very long ago, if we scrolled down enough on our Facebook feeds, content that we had already viewed would show up. It would remind us that we were pushing for more content that didn't exist and that it is time we got off the website/app. Now, software engineers are doing everything they can to ensure that we are provided with an optimum (maximum) amount of content with no duplications. The quality of content shared with users is undoubtedly questionable but it is still content and when consuming it is plain easy, the quality doesn't bother many. As users, we also get to create content because we are entitled to free speech. If free speech simply means that we are allowed voice out our opinions and when a platform allows us to do just that, how do we predict the quality of content and its actual worth of consumption before we even choose to consume it? The answer is - we don't know. Consequently, we sell ourselves to content that is intended to be sold to us, a bit too easily, because doing so is just plain easy. 

But is selling ourselves to content detrimental to our quality of existence? One could argue, "so what?". As long as the world functions and everyone continues to live a life that (s)he is satisfied with, who cares? "So what?", I don't know. But "who cares?" - we care and we fail to recognize that we do. As we inexplicably sell ourselves to all the content we consume, we miss out on opportunities (time) to create a personal space that we intrinsically love. How often have we cut off from hobbies that we pursued as kids with joy and why? What are we if we don't create? I would assume that it would be healthy to spend as much time creating as we do consuming content. To better picture the difference between creating and consuming, we could visualize them as a different states of existence, consumption being closer to non-existence and creation being close to true-existence. In the time that we get with ourselves, obligations aside, if we choose to only consume content that is easily available to us, we are failing to create individualistic depictions of our true thoughts. 

"To create, you need not be "creative". Creativity is not an inborn characteristic. Prodigies do not exist. It is differences in the degree of training that influence the output from a certain system (in this case, an individual).", said my professor during his lecture about viewing creativity as an exact science. "Only creativity coupled with integrity can solve real problems. Nature cannot be fooled and to solve problems that mar human life, freedom of thought must exist." Clearly, we are all free to think, but contextually speaking, "freedom of thought" here refers to thoughts unconditioned by a collective mindset that circumstances of our times ingrain in us. 

The uncertainty associated with "what's the next story on my Facebook feed" is certainly exciting but by giving in, we allow our minds to be littered with hastily-created content. Social media feeds are not very different from soap operas that are low on quality content but hugely popular. It is a masala offering that ties a lot of our lives together and attempts to entertain us while stealthily studying our usage patterns to display ads that best suit our needs. In simpler words, consuming low quality content in excessive amounts impairs our ability to create. With no creativity, there is no innovation and with no innovation, we cannot solve real problems that we are faced with. The balance is the key and to achieve this balance, we must make a purposive effort to differentiate between good and bad at a very personal and fundamental level. Provided we sort this out, we will have our answer to the question "why are we what we are?".