The least original of epiphanies are also the truest.
After binging on a TV show for 65 hours on a phone over a week ago, I got transient smartphone blindness. I’m recovering slowly and able to see better every day.
Losing vision helped me see things with clarity. The blur made me focus on what’s important. Suddenly, the clutter began to disappear with the most obvious and the most cliched of modern epiphanies.
Blindness has made me see.
The truth has always been right in front of our eyes as a boring cliche.
That none of this is real.
“It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” (The Matrix)
All those people on Facebook aren’t your friends. Your followers on Twitter don’t exactly follow you. And your Instagram… is not even you. It’s a version you want to project to the world with skin/colour altering flaw-reducing filters in larger than life costumes and locations eating overpriced great looking food that rarely matches the taste – it’s just great play of light.
Nothing we see through the windows of our phones or laptops has ever been real. They are quite accurately called screens because they are used for projecting an image, a story, a narrative – and we are just willing consumers.
I’m typing this on that very screen because this has become the interface we have been communicating on.
I want to give this interface a break and just communicate face to face. Maybe I’m just getting too old for toys. Or maybe this is just my severely distressed eyes asking me get the fuck away from screens. For a while, at least.
The simplest joys in life are real.
There’s not a camera made that can do justice to the feeling you get seeing the moon at night. There’s no text that can do possibly capture the high of the life’s best moments.
A touch is real. Keeping in touch isn’t.
We shouldn’t have to strain our eyes so hard for anything. In fact, we shouldn’t have to strain ourselves for anyone.
People who matter always stick around no matter what. Yes, I do have FOMO but it’s time to face my fear.
Less than 24 hours ago, I woke up to go to the beach for mixed martial arts training. It was incredible.
It was real. But I turned it into an Insta story. I want to snap out of stories.
I want to snap out of communicating through 0s & 1s. It’s time to log out and see how long I can survive without The Matrix.
I realised I have so much more fun meeting people and talking in the real world and this doesn’t feel even come close.
You know where to find me. I’m a phone call/a doorbell away.
See you in the real world.
Unplugged.
MADRAS INK. 