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beatricegomes

Sacrifice

You pry your eyes open and the first thing you do is roll over to check the small screen holding your life together. You feel a surge of joy in your chest when you see the notifications though you feel a lingering annoyance at the pending tasks other people have put in front of you. You swing your legs out of bed and walk down the hall to your home office, the grand name you give the small desk pushed up against a wall and propping up a monitor. For the next 8–10 hours, you will work from your medium screen. When you're done, you'll reward yourself with some time laying back and sipping a beer while you watch vaguely human-shaped piles of plastic throw martinis at each other on the large screen. Are we really better off, or just better distracted?

We're obsessed with keeping busy. We glorify hustle culture and the burnout it brings. We're in an endless loop of waking up just to work and going to sleep just to fuel our labor. We are taught to wrap our identity up in our output. The inner self is discarded along with any passions and hobbies that don't contribute to the meager piles of gold we hope to gather throughout our lifetimes. Video games are just wasteful—you could be teaching yourself to code with that time. It's sweet that you like to crochet—have you ever tried selling your work on Etsy?

Hustle at work. Marathon that Netflix show. Keep checking how many likes you got on that social media post, even though you don't care. You don't really care about that sort of thing. But there's that small pang of anxiety, like a guitar string being stretched tight in your chest, when you think about not measuring up to all the rest. You hold your yardstick up to your shortcomings and their highlight reels. This world is designed to keep us busy and anxious. It distracts us from a mind-numbing lack of meaning in our lives.

The endless stream of nothingness helps dull the pain a bit. We scroll and tap past births and deaths and all the mundane little moments that happen in between. Do you remember when media feeds had pages instead of the neverending scroll? They're now carefully designed to keep you trapped in the content loop. You can't stop scrolling now when you have the next breaking news or hilarious social media post right below. Just one more. It can't hurt. You can't afford to miss the next big thing.

Art used to mean something. Now, it's just media. Content. Product. Culture has shifted away from artistic expression and toward meaningless consumption. Slaves to the doom-scroll. We're so privileged to no longer need to cross international borders to experience history's great masters: da Vinci, Van Gogh, Goya. They're now at our fingertips. But instead we're drowning in noise. You no longer feel the surge of anticipation as you approach the room holding Starry Night. You don't stand in front of it with your heart pounding. You don't feel transported to that French village with the detail of each brushstroke.

Instead you see a social media post with a 700x300-pixel picture. You give it a glance and then scroll on to the next piece of content. All those little wasted moments add up, though. Those seconds of scrolling pile up into minutes and hours, to days and years of your life. The attention economy is stealing years of our lives. In chasing constant stimulation, we’ve lost the ability to sit still without feeling like we’re falling behind. We’ve filled every quiet moment with noise, and now we don’t know how to be alone with ourselves.

I am 21 years or older.