The people of my generation and younger, not that I'm so wise as to know whether these people are the majority or not, are becoming nihilists. They place no significant weight on human interaction or the importance of manners and respect. It's all an inconvenience on the way to what they want, where they need to be. Be it in video games, jobs, friendships, activities, you name it. Technology is catering to the individual, and in the process the individual loses sight of what it is to be an individual; technology has replaced it. The situation I was in is, albeit, at the highest level of this; people who have been so deeply immersed in the competitive gaming world, so used to using the people around them that they interact with them more like objects than people deserving of respect and care. It is not a fun experience of gathered enjoyment, but one of utter indifference.
Technology makes it convenient for nothing to matter. It can cut everything down to it's absolute core if you so desire, but this is a delusion. A digital world has been crafted, not unlike The Matrix, of information and influence. Social networking, media, gaming, forums; it's all there. The tools available are astounding, and the ideas are sound, but the reality is horrifying. Anyone who's ever spent over a week or two completely seperated from technology in nature or the wild should understand what reality actually is. It's not treating people like garbage. Not feeding into internet persona addiction. Not assuming you know how everything is because technology has given you the answers. You have no answers. You have an altered perspective of the world, while perhaps being true in it's knowledge of facts, lacks the feeling behind them. The way the world is right now, It's not only stripping away any reasons to care, but also reasons to feel.
The age of social networking has degraded interpersonal relationships at an astounding degree, in too many different layers for me to describe here. Our dependence on immediate satisfaction in the form of the internet and technology is now taken for granted, and almost everything is seen as boring or overdone by today's youth. Imagine the joy and excitement that people of older generations would look at today's world in, only to see the people who have now grown up in it living it in a perspective that seems utterly barren of honesty the old ones are seeing it with.
None of what I say will matter, because I'm a hypocrite. Everything here that I condemn, I use. I preach against people disparaging others online, but my words mean nothing because I have no face. People will read this and say I should "stop crying", and to just "get over it". I have the awareness of what this is all about, the danger of it, but I won't cut it off from my life simply because everyone else revolves around it. To change is to become even more alienated from my generation, not that that's scared me before. I'm sure it will happen soon enough.
"Nobody cares about anything anymore. And no one knows why nobody cares." -The Void
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