being mobile

The youth is a species in itself. They are these explorative creatures who are willing to try almost everything that comes their way. If one tries to find a specific value that youth emerges from, it will fall face first; simply because there is no ‘one value’ that drives the culture of youth. Even out of the many similar values, there are many contradictory values that keep popping out.

For the sake of this essay, consider the active lifestyle of youth — where they want to socialise, they want to achieve great heights in career, in social life, in personal life, in emotional life too, they want to see places and go places at the same time, places that exist within, places that are unexplored, places that are beautiful to see and experience, and also places to travel, they want to travel within, know their worth, be more knowledgeable about self, and also about their surroundings, maybe the surroundings of their surroundings, they want to go to the moon, they want to go to the neighbourhood lake.

However, on the other hand, we see them with all these gadgets in hand and with every day but high-tech technology, which makes them staying in one place so much easier. Why go to a friend’s place to meet when you can convey an instant message through a mobile application? Why go to the movie theatre brawling through the static traffic, when you can download a movie and watch it in the cozy corner of the home? Feeling angry with a friend is conveyed so easily by un-following on a social network site. Communication, entertainment, emotions, and many such every day rudimentary happenings have all become so lifeless, if I may say.

The Internet came into being when the idea of productivity through technology started picking up pace. Both the Internet and the Productivity boom were based on the basic principle of making a man’s life easier. ‘Easier’ here would mean less physical strain, less time consumption and more quality of work, and also a very systematic style of work. While one cannot deny the mammoth opportunities these two have given rise to, they have also given foundations to questionable outcomes. It is not fair to the negative connotations when talked about in a disheartening way. The negatives are the only drivers that make the positives taste so much juicier. Only in a traffic jam would a flowery conversation emerge with the cab driver. A hard day of physical labour makes the bed so much softer. Being extra systematic declines us with the sweet pleasures of life. The sweet pleasures of the everyday and the familiar are much sought after rather than the luxuries of the unknown. There is a fun element associated with learning from own mistakes; humans are tuned in that way. The sweetness of the destination only depends on the nourishment of the journey. Journeys are all about new explorations and mobility is just a tool to achieve the same.

This tool has recently (or feels like since forever) shifted to a ‘sedentary lifestyle’. A sedentary lifestyle is the collaborative and undeniably undesirable outcome of a range of reasons. Productivity has produced a surplus of time, opportunities, and amenities. Instead of going to the library, one can now ‘Google it up’. This saved a lot of your time, but what was achieved in that extra time? Have our ideas, as a society, improved because we have more time to think about our work? Humans are thinkers. If productivity is hampering thinking, it is producing more undesired than useful outcomes. Our goal is not to make technology our master; that is not what evolution has taught us. If we make technology so fit that its survival will sustain beyond its maker’s, then that is not a future that humans see for themselves. We cannot deny the other causes of this ‘sedentary demon’. Since media culture is prevalent and almost a big chunk of it exists on technological mediums, youth is oblivious to the thinking that ‘It is not necessary for me to go out for a walk when I have my dose of entertainment / information on my lap’. The only criteria missing from this statement was interaction — but that has been more than taken care of by our worthy designers of today. There is a feeling of comfort in chatting for hours on social media, while that of discomfort when talking within a group face to face. We wanted comfort now so we designed systems which would lead us there and in the process, help us to gain more time in life. Even if productivity did create that surplus everything, it was the youth’s responsibility to make meaning out of it.

Time is another valuable notion in youth life. For pre-adolescents, it seems that there is a lot of time to achieve so live life slowly. For adults, life can end any moment so enjoy every little pleasure. But for youth, what needs to be achieved is now, in the present; the issue here is when combined with the contradiction of laziness, this achievement gets 10 times less plausible. The Indian culture practices the art of ‘karam’ and ‘dharam’. Is it possible that doing that for so many centuries has now left the youth with the notion that ‘We want the calm life now, we have worked and slaved ourselves through centuries and now is our time to rest’? Is there any justification for this statement? But well, there is no justification, other than a similar one, then for our caste reservation system. That is how India is working today. It wants to eat through their ancestors’ leftovers.

Is there an India where not being the slaves of their pasts or others’ past, EVERYBODY’S RESPONSIBILITY? Can we make a shift and say that BEING MOBILE IS WHAT’S NATURAL TO HUMANS? We got our independence from the foreign country’s rule some 70 years ago, and it took us 150 years to achieve it. When will the midnight speech towards being mobile happen? How do we, as today’s youth generation and today’s explorers, START AN IDEA TODAY to show that we have the power to BRING TOGETHER THE CONTRADICTORY?

Or could we also keep doing what we do best, use technology to its fittest, and see ourselves winning over it rather than the other way round? Just keep playing Pokemon Go, but take it to the next level and apply the similar motivations to everyday sedentary tasks.

#mobility#cons of technology#productivity#surplus#creative writing for inspiration