A moment of truth
An average human being lives for a billion seconds, yet it’s just a single second which decides his ultimate truth. A moment is the difference between someone’s life and death. Everyone has these moments — some are lucky enough to out muscle it once in a while, while some are less fortunate.
A billion seconds of struggle broils down to just one moment, yet we feel we are in control. We feel we know what’s happening with our life. We make decisions and plan accordingly to head towards the life we envision for ourselves, but we never realize that it may not be in our control at all. Perhaps, it could be wise to leave that decision to fate, but as humans, it’s only natural that we feel superior to everything in life.
As a CEO of multinational company that strives to change a billion of lives in the world, I wasn’t different from other humans in terms of feeling superior. Only, I knew I was ahead of other billion people in the world, before one day, it all converged down to one moment.
Hi, this is Randolph Laurens and this is my moment of truth.
Growing up, I always pictured myself as revolutionary. Everyone does it. We all expect us to make a difference in the world. We feel we have a purpose to our existence — that we will somehow change the dimension of the universe by our own invention. It’s what drives us to achieve greatness as humans, but slowly, we realize it doesn’t matter at all. Nothing really does. We are just a small piece of a timeline far bigger than our imagination and with time, our memories in this world will fade away like a cotton candy no matter how prevalent we were in our life. It’s just the way life works.
Luckily, I really managed to do something that changed the world. Or maybe not, but surely changed the lives of billion people in my world.
It could be too self-absorbed to write about your own inventions in a note, but it’s something I will always be proud of for the rest of my life ( or perhaps seconds). It gave me the satisfaction and bliss until one day, it turned out to be my own sledge-hammer.
What my invention certainly gave me was a sense of control — a sense of power. I thought I controlled my own moments along with billion of moments of other people. It’s interesting how power and money work. They give you a sense of invincibility — through comfort and rigor. It’s like an addiction, until one day it makes you realize you are in the same illusion as billions of other people. No one is invincible, and no one has the control over their ‘moment’.
Due to my relentless drive to innovate, I was able to build a social media network that worked right from your eyes. It was real life — except, you react to people’s opinions right from your brain and read their status from the top of their heads. It was a pioneer in social media technology — one of it’s kind and what was crucial for me was the privacy. That is why I decided to encrypt every thing in my social media world myself, and store the zillions of bytes of data without a centralized network. It was like the recipe for Coca- Cola — no one could extract any information from my project except me but the legacy would follow suite for the rest of eternity. In fact, I swore an oath to protect it from the grasp of people who had the same false illusion of control over life as I once did.
Until, one day… I got a call from FBI!
Naturally, you fear. You know what’s coming next. FBI, like it always does, wants me to set up a surveillance for them. “It’s for the better of the world” — the FBI director tells me so persuasively in the phone. Except I know it isn’t, it’s just a farce sense of protection to fulfill their own propaganda. A false scuffle for elucidation. The world doesn’t need it. It doesn’t need a corrupt agency spying on them for twenty-four hours for a machine to decide on their own future. It was against my vision for the world. Still, it was the FBI!
I had to decide between letting go everything I built on years and my essence, and my life. It was a decision I had to make. The money and power I amassed over the years meant nothing. I felt helpless. All it did was buy me sometime before making an ultimate decision- a flicker of time to project a plan C when it would never exist.
I had to choose. But, I also knew it wasn’t solely my decision to make. It made me stroll back to the wonderful memories I had with a Muslim man two years ago. A machine could monitor the activities and make a prediction, but it will never understand the true crux of human feelings. Maybe, one day, the same Muslim man could be mistaken for a terrorist by the very same surveillance system I set up, based on the struggles he’s facing in his life and his unorthodox mechanisms to cope with it. It’s something I will have to live with, but I don’t know if I can.
I really don’t know.
So today, while I’m jotting down words with utmost difficulty, I stand at the top of the SnapEye’s headquarters with an ultimate decision to make.
After all, my life hasn’t been so bad.
I lived through a billion of seconds— some happy and some sad to build up for this moment.
One last moment.
A moment of truth.
