Kicking against The Upgrade

Kicking against The Upgrade

You know when you just don’t get it. That thing that everyone else seems to get and you seem to be the only one just not getting it? Like you’re somehow virtually stuck inside the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and you’re the little guy yelling: “The Emperor’s not wearing any clothes!” 

I feel like that a lot! I mean A LOT! 

I landed in Sydney this past weekend essentially on a visit to see my children whom I haven’t seen since the world went mad. I have to say, flying over 10 000 kms via Singapore, (which to my mind is one of the most sanitised countries on the planet, and this was BEFORE the dreaded lurgie,) gives one a lot of time to think and up there in the actual clouds as opposed to the virtual cloud, which it seems is where most people spend most of their time in this new world, potentially gives one a great perspective. 

Flying over Madagascar above the clouds one is able to make out the western coastline on the approach from the Indian Ocean, then as the breadth of the island passes almost silently below, excepting for the hum of the engines, the eastern coastline and the mountainous inland regions, which look like the land surface was crumpled by some irate giant, eons ago. There is very likely some wonderful mythology related around communal fires over the centuries to little firelight faces about how these mountain ranges were formed.

It seems such a pity that we are now able to move so swiftly from one place to the other that we are even able to be catapulted a few hours into the future where we then have to deal with the exhausting effects of “quantum travel” when we land. While we fly from the silent blackness into the sunrise I contemplate  an almost unfathomable question. How does this generation which so relentlessly photographs and obsessively stores billions of gigabytes of memories on social media and in “the cloud” (as my “woke” children remind me it’s not the “clouds”) which pursues eternal youth through every kind of toxic plumping and sucking and micro surgery, is the same generation constantly queuing up for the latest futuristic gadgetry which stores their very lives in the bits and bytes of modern technology which it chases after and which in turn pursues everyone one of us demanding to store every cellular impulse we have until we are hounded into a silent grave where we can at last lie in peace. 

Ah me! As I ponder these thoughts “aloud” on my iPhone, contemplating how even these very thoughts may no longer be private in the foreseeable future, as I discipline my mind to live more mindfully and prepare to take my place amongst the dinosaurs, I find myself asking: how will we find the balance? 

Will it boil down to an either or? Do we kick against it or do we capitulate and “upgrade?” 

I was recently asked why I still own CDs. “Who still listens to CDs?” Short answer: I do. Long answer: I cannot and do not want to replace all that music digitally although I guess I could transfer it all onto some kind of device if I were interested (which I’m not) however, thankfully, my car still has a CD player so I can live in my own little world for a while longer … me and the other dinosaurs in my car … like the manual clutch and gearshift; the safety belt that doesn’t tighten itself into a suffocating vice grip around my abdomen and the ignition that doesn’t turn itself off at traffic lights.

I manually turn up the volume on my little car radio, yes, no Alexa listening in, as I ease into the first song on my Louis Armstrong CD … and I think to myself: “What a wonderful world …”