Proximity

March 23rd. 2020, I downloaded TikTok; was instantly addicted; swiped till 04:00 in exhaustion; woke up the next day with excruciating angst, and deleted it.

The pain came with a realization of where its toxicity came from: yet another attack to our metaphysics by mass media. The deprivation of interaction within our proximity has never been so vividly manifested in this many facades.

TikTok reminds us how pitifully little there is left of our courage, confidence, and human decency to explore, and approach our proximity. Its sheer existence became the justification for the interactions which, not long ago, propelled the building of communities and the establishment of existential impurities: the genuine expression of personal feelings, the trust amongst strangers in our proximity, and above all, the tenderness of our human connections. We lost the safe proximity to let out, so we either keep them to ourselves at the closest, or bear till the point of uncontrolled catharsis, yet bringing it to the most aloft platform possible, whose audience we ironically rely on because of their randomness.

It gives me a chill on what we have to fabricate now. More so, the ubiquitousness of the lenses in our pockets squeezed the very last bit of the faith in proximity into obliviation. The fear now begins to feed itself.

Then, we realized we stopped being curious about our proximity, to whatever and whoever is immediately surrounding us. Tucked down onto our tiniest screen upon which we feel like in complete control, as we paralyzing our consciousness with the far unreachable, built by, and for, those who obliviated their soul: being bombarded with the illusion of ease for fame, yet only end up attaining destruction when futilely try to grasp an utmost reduction, one of our social identity. 

The Edge of Reality

Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.

Our generation has since been devoured by a constant sense of ungroundedness, poisoned by the most detrimental bane of the modern age: the romanticism of an image-world. The illusion that we each are destined to a form of perfection in the material world: that we are embarking on a romantic journey voyaging towards a morally better self.

The democratization of mass media is increasingly fueled by our own reaction to the necessarily staged images therein. We live in a realm wherein the reality is images: they only represent the glamorous, the exaggerated, the pretentious, and, above all, the unreal. The problem though is that we are all, unconsciously, conjugating such magic of dramatization. Regardless of how infinitesimally trivial the rewards of our fetish - likes, subs, and deep down, the rush of vanity - we eventually reach the point where what we see becomes what we materialize in our minds, mistaken as reality itself. We have grown in our heads, unreasonably lofty paradigms, by definition deformed by fantasy, to which we compare our otherwise unique and invaluable views and relationships, smashing them all into lesser ones.

We have fallen the edge of reality: our experience could only be validated by the awareness of others. The detachment almost becomes an existential crisis, whereby the otherwise angst and anxiety is now second nature. As we then evolve a fake skin to display our defensive side, our cherishment for what-have-yous completely vanishes.

To experience a thing as a beautiful means to experience it necessarily wrongly.

And we have never been this far to realize as so.