Sometimes it feels like we’ve stopped emotionally being people and started being more like appliances. Not the useful kind that make toast or brew coffee, but the little round kind that hums quietly through the living room, bumping into walls and sucking up whatever happens to be on the floor.
I think that we have essentially become emotional Roombas at this point, wandering aimlessly across the vast carpet of modern life, guided by invisible algorithms and the occasional viral post that tells us where to go next.
You can almost hear the whirring sound of our collective motor as we drift toward the latest outrage, or the next shiny distraction. A celebrity says something absurd, and suddenly we are all there, clustering like lint, cleaning up their mess while adding a bit of our own. Tomorrow it will be a new trend, a new digital broom to chase across the tiles of our attention span. We like to believe we are making choices, but really, we’re just bouncing from signal to signal, waiting for our battery to die or the Wi-Fi to go out.
It’s not entirely our fault. Thinking has become exhausting. Reflection doesn’t come with a “like” button, and you can’t monetize quiet contemplation. There is no dopamine rush in sitting alone with your own thoughts, unless those thoughts happen to go viral on TikTok.
So we outsource our opinions to the influencers and commentators who do the heavy lifting for us. They tell us what’s funny, what’s offensive, and what to be outraged about this week. They even give us the vocabulary to express our outrage, complete with emojis and hashtags.
And we are grateful for it. We no longer have to wonder what’s true, or what’s worth caring about. Someone will tell us soon enough. All we have to do is nod, repost, and move on. It’s efficient, in the same way that a self-driving car is efficient. You arrive somewhere, but you have no idea how you got there.
The real tragedy of it all is that the human mind is a remarkable thing; but only when used. It’s not a decorative organ, though that’s how we treat it these days, polishing it occasionally with a podcast or a quote from a dead philosopher before putting it back on the shelf. Like a muscle, it atrophies without exercise. The less we think, the less we can think. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of dullness. We scroll ourselves, day by day, into a deeper stupor, lulled by a constant feed of amusement and outrage that never quite gives us enough time to realize we’re starving for real thought.
Sometimes I wonder what future archaeologists will make of us. They’ll dig up our glowing rectangles and marvel at how a civilization could be so informed and so ignorant at the same time. They’ll find our social media posts and assume they were written during some collective fever dream. “Surely,” they’ll say, “they didn’t all believe this nonsense – did they?”
But we did. Because it was easier. Because the hum of the Roomba is soothing. Because independent thought requires courage, and courage is a muscle we haven’t used in a long time either.
Maybe it’s not too late to reboot ourselves. Maybe we can still pull the plug on the endless hum and sit, for a while, in silence. It would be strange at first, uncomfortable even, to have to think our own thoughts and face our own reflections without a screen to filter them. But perhaps, somewhere in that quiet, we might rediscover what it feels like to be human again.
Until then, the Roomba spins on.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.