pages for pixel
Buying into ideas has never been so easy. Last night I found myself in a hole, the one that I always find myself needing to be dug out of, and my phone in my hand. All of my socials have been deleted long ago, my streaming subscriptions canceled for the sake of boycotting, and my messages silenced from a state of subconscious distancing from my friends. I redownloaded just one app, and immediately the attention economy threaded throughout the algorithm caught my mood, my thoughts, and the state of my well-being. The feed began. It started at 7pm, a Friday night, where my exhaustion overcame my thoughts. Just one video on workout ideas, then someone's feelings about feeling left out, and then an infinite stream of short form content that fed me fake inspiration for my time. The people have been payed out, yet the price left my safes ransacked, the reinvesting of my night empty, and as the people came to ask more of me I could understand how the Great Depression's events played out. Soon it was 11 pm, I was too tired to really think just like how I was at 7 pm, except now more drained at my inaction. I felt moved by the lives everyone else seemed to be living, exhausted by the one I claimed for myself. So finally, I picked up a book. Works of fiction, where they are long drawn into stories of hundreds of pages, and the characters are not even real, is what delivers me from my own bouts of existentialism. Just like the old man sipping his glasses down in Hemingway's short story, " A Clean Well-Lighted Place", the pixels that buzzed around my head always left the darkness to feel, "all a nothing" and for hours I payed out to people I'll never meet lead me to question "what is an hour," when the app developers have already decided, "more to me than to" her (Hemingway). Once 11 pm struck, and the day faded into nothingness, I finally picked up pages to quiet the unrested thoughts that scrolling left to me. A book that I found years ago perusing the library shelves, sticking out for its neon pink cover and block like font, recalled me for a reread. Now, years later, I own my own copy filled by the fabulous quotes with marginalia and dog eared pages. I felt the shame from my ill used time dissipate, and doom from the illusive hours spent on nothingness exchanged over the bank counter for real thoughts. Real stories. Real imagination. Real time spent on a work of fiction, written and published by a real hardworking woman. Every page I turned, tangible between my pointer and thumb, brought me back to the realness of the human experience even after I was led to believe by the pixels I'd sold my ability to think. My creativity in debt to another as I vicariously lived through their ideas. So today, in the morning light, I'll re-delete the that app. Pick up another library book on my way home. Go to bed when the exhaustion hits. I'll live as I was always meant to, paying my time for pages over pixels. @