Second Part Consumption
Now, I’m not referring to ‘the consumption’ which was a name given to tuberculosis because it seemed to ‘consume an individual’ due to the rapid weight loss. I’m talking about the consumption culture stemming from ‘the more stuff you have the more successful you are’ mentality.
Let’s go to prehistory when people were nomadic. There were no cities or towns, there was no agriculture or farming. There was only hunting and gathering.
When these nomads found a food source (and this is especially true with calorie dense foods like meat) they gorged on it knowing very well that they may not be eating for the next few days. This gorging function still exists today with food because:
A: We haven’t conquered our prehistoric genetic programming
B: We’re suckers for salt, fat & sugar; which manufacturers cram as much of into our foods as they can to get you to consume more, but let’s save that for a different time.
This time we focus on the in-built gorging function, which though still exists with food, has also copied across to information. The food of our minds.
In the tech age, you consume information; this information is both useful and useless. We have the world’s information available to us at any given time, but the ease of access & almost zero cost involved means we, by nature, will consume as much as we can, which in the case of food makes us fat but in the case of information this makes us fickle, which then makes us vapid.
So imagine those prehistoric nomadic humans ran into a patch of land with a herd of cattle surrounded by fruit trees and naturally growing vegetables. These humans by nature will consume as much of it as they can because it is in their nature to do so. They have no knowledge of farming, only hunting gathering and consuming. So they only consume, and once there is nothing left to consume, they move on looking for another source of food.
This is where we are with regards to information currently. We are not yet developed enough to deal with, to cope with, to filter, to switch off the ever so rapidly gushing tap of information. We just don’t have the cognitive tools to make productive use of information.
Why is this gorging function so prevalent?
Why is it so hard to control?
Because it defines our success.
Again, going back to prehistory, the male who could secure the food, had a better chance of attracting the female who would allow for the continuation and spreading of his genes by having babies. Same thing on the female side where they seek a male who can provide them and their babies with food, shelter and security from predators.
Fast forward to modernity and the person (no longer gender dependent) for example with a nice car and house will attract a larger quantity of partners than the person with a shitty car and house or none at all. From that increased quantity the person can choose their partner (or partners) according to their taste. This defines success on the most subconscious, genetic level, and it goes to prove that in this modern time, the person with more stuff is more successful.
Now, the majority of people don’t form part of the nice car, big house club. So I guess now we may be trying to replicate success by replacing stuff (like physical goods) with information, and more precisely, the quantity we consume. The more we consume it, the less effect it has on us and the less chance we will remember it later on as it will be replaced by the new thing we are consuming. Our brains have a very limited capacity in comparison to the amount of information that is being produced. That is quite obvious, but what’s important is that now, via technology, we have access to that information at almost no cost, and boy do we consume it like crazy.
As a result our memory gets shorter, we have less of an attention span. Try watching a really old movie (like 50 years plus old) & notice how boring it is because of the snails pace at which it moves. So due to the shortening of our attention span the information we consume needs to be more spectacular, more fantastic, more banal to get our attention, (not keep it, just get it) which leads our memory to get shorter still and the information needs to get more and more extraordinary. This is the cycle. In a practical application one can be presented with a government deciding to restrict the freedoms of its citizens at the behest of corporate interests. Of course because of the prevalence of media you will know about it. You will get upset, angry, voice your opinion, read others opinions, but by next week, you would have forgotten about it.
This short attention span then leads to a very short term outlook on everything, resulted no doubt from the ‘I want it now’ culture. Technology certainly makes this possible with instant information but simultaneously creates a phenomenon called digital amnesia. A condition where the stream of information that is received is so large that it leaves the simple human brain frozen in the ‘here & now’ in an ever failing bid to make sense of it all, and as a result all remnants of what happened in the past are pushed out and thus forgotten.
But why is the past so important?
Because…
