I should begin by wishing my readers well for 2023. Yet it all sounds so superfluous, even trite and overused these days.
We all live in a world where timeframes -– the marking of years – have no meaningful use anymore. Years begin and end with a value similar to the boiling of water or the changing of toilet rolls.
As a child of the 1960s, I do recall a nostalgia around these “new year” moments, which have all been replaced by the most meaningful things – whether I have uploaded my latest pictures to my social media platforms and have received the appropriate amount of likes.
There is a nostalgia that I wish to ponder – the lost value of being a good human friend.
We have reduced the value of human connection to one “if I can’t find you on social media, you don't exist to me”; or “if you are not working on some great corporate or political issue, I can’t relate to you”.
A tragedy of calamitous consequence awaits us as we enter a future of cancerous loneliness. We have determined others' value to us or our value to them by three electronic buttons: block, like or delete.
At the end of our lives, we will exist as products of some electronic algorithm - a consequence of who we blocked, deleted and liked.
It is the wise ones of the world who know how to weave valued nostalgia, critical new and necessary (in)novation into a cord of three strands that cannot easily be broken. #23thoughtsabout2023 pic.twitter.com/ufKscHzrhS
I want to meet people, and hopefully find them to be friends. I want the simplicity of being with people with whom I don’t constantly need to be making conversation.
I want the simplicity of friendships that are comfortable with the art of boiling water or watching each other change a toilet roll. I want the simplicity of enjoying the warm presence of others in my life.
I want to be one of and not the centre of some constant adrenaline rush. I want to spontaneously talk about boiling water and changing toilet rolls as we do about planning, reading, imagining and innovating the trajectory towards a better human society. It’s not a case of either or. I want both. I don’t want a life of constant adrenaline rushes of having to do “great” things.
I am tired of having to have to “go somewhere” or answering the question of “what are we doing tonight?”; or “have you been to the latest … ?”
It’s 2023 and I no longer want to answer those questions. I want to be asked different questions. And no, I don’t know what those questions are yet. But I know the ones I don’t want to answer anymore.
I’m tired of having a bag of tricks that I can do with people to mitigate awkward silences when they become bored with my company.
Why is my boredom rating the ultimate determinant of my value to others? Why has boredom become the litmus test of friendships?
Why should the value of spending time with someone be determined by whether it’s worthy enough to get enough likes on social media? What if we did not make social media the arbiter of our human friendships?
Our social media accounts have become like those evangelists from the 1960s who told us what’s acceptable and not acceptable. They banned normality and told us that doing ordinary things was bad for us.
Now we all worship at the altars of the 2023 social media evangelists’ approval of our lives.
I long for the flat tyre moments of going nowhere and doing nothing and falling asleep on someone’s lap – because they love me – or even just tolerate me.
Sometimes I switch the kettle off before it boils. Sometimes I only put the toilet roll on the holder when it’s about midway.
I always put salt on to my tomato before I put the pepper on. Never the other way around. It's the stuff I’d like to have conversations about with you.
* Lorenzo Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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