There was once, or perhaps there still is, a rhythm to things. A cadence not dictated by the artificial metronome of notifications, nor the pale blue hum of an LED-lit existence. We moved, once, in step with breath and hunger, with desire and fatigue, with the rise of the sun and the fading of the stars. But now? Now we flick, we swipe, we scroll—perpetually pausing at the threshold of experience but never stepping through.
Simone de Beauvoir, who knew something about the weight of being, saw clearly the difference between sustaining life and actually living it. She said: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying”. And yet here we are, preserved rather than engaged, embalmed in a scrolling eternity. A people neither dead nor alive, only suspended in an anxious limbo where we feel through proxy, where we consume sensation in fragments but never risk the wholeness of our own.
It is easy, of course, to be entertained into submission. The screen offers us a pre-packaged version of everything: the adventure without the risk, the drama without the stakes, the intimacy without the ache of real attachment. Every moment is accounted for, parceled into digestible clips, narrated and curated so we need never feel the raw unpredictability of an unscripted hour. We are not starved, not exactly. But we are fed in a way that does not nourish.
So the question lingers: do we fear living, or have we simply forgotten how? If one were to step outside the manufactured glow of the screen, if one were to dare an afternoon without the anesthetic of distraction—what then? Would the world appear too vast, too indifferent? Would we feel the discomfort of our own unedited thoughts pressing in on us? Perhaps it is easier, after all, to stay within the shallow end, to keep our pleasures bite-sized and our experiences mediated by glass.
But this isn’t really living, it’s just not quite yet being dead.
To live is to press into the density of existence, to feel the jagged edges of time rather than smoothing them into an endless, monotonous now. It is to make mistakes that cannot be deleted, to say things that do not fit within character limits, to walk unfamiliar streets without the reassurance of a digital map. It is to risk embarrassment, heartbreak, inconvenience. It is to become, rather than simply remain.
And so, we are left with a choice, though we rarely acknowledge it as one. Do we stay here, in this soft, luminous stasis? Or do we—at last, and however clumsily—begin again to live?
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.