31 Oct 2016

You stare at an open book. You know all the words, their definitions, the implications of certain combinations. Something isn’t right. In this book, on this page, printed with a paragraph made up of these sentences, they seem foreign to you. Like that split second you’re mid sip, and realise you’ve been drinking from a cup that isn’t yours, if feels off. Your mind scatters, and begins to wander into a million different directions. What time is it? How long have I been sitting here? What am I going to eat later? How much longer do I have to sit here? Before you know it, the hours are gone and you’re desperately trying to recover them, but it’s like trying to grip a handful of sand. The minutes slip and spill from your fingers. Why can’t you concentrate?

Not to diminish anything from those with actual ADHD, but it seems to be as if this collective generation is inflicted with some lesser form of the attention deficit disorder. The more I get to talking with other people, the more I am convinced of it. Older generations will have you believe that it’s just a matter of an extinct work ethic, the long dead roll-up-your-sleeve attitude from a bygone era; maybe even that we are spoilt and have no motivation.

However true that statement may be, there’s no denying that at some point, we decided four minute videos were simply too long and thus Vine was born. And then somewhere along the way, we got bored with seven, I say again seven, second videos. And then what happened? We just let Vine die. We let a company valued at an estimated $3 billion die in this increasingly common process of moving onto the next hot thing. Just by not giving a shit. Where cultural zeitgeist was expressed in novels and poetry in the years past, we have memes about a dead gorilla and pulling your dick out therein to mourn said gorilla. So what is it about our generation in particular that makes us so vulnerable to a lack of mental stamina?

Back onto the Vine angle, let’s think about stimulus and entertainment. We live in an unprecedented moment in history of unlimited entertainment on instant demand. With a flick of a wrist (ayye), a touch of a finger, and a small loan of a million hours, you can watch the entirety of SVU. All four hundred years of it (by my estimate but I could be wrong, sure feels like it though…). This is so much so that suddenly, the week by week episode release format of television that has remained relatively unchanged for the past sixty or so years became an upload date of entire seasons online. Television doesn’t even live in television anymore. Why? Because we weren’t paying attention to television, that would take time away from computers and phone screens. What a time to be alive. On that same note, we can now also access an impossible amount of music, images, information, all in a heartbeat. Perhaps we are spoilt.

I hate throwing vague platitudes but at this point, it’s like throwing another Molotov cocktail at the already burning factory fire, so here goes nothing. We shouldn’t let this be a weakness. We shouldn’t be looked down upon for being a product of our environment. It’s simply the nature of the times. We will not be a generation defined by a trend or a hashtag. We are the children of the information age, the bleeding edge of the cloud, and the access codes for a brighter tomorrow. So we don’t like to stay still. We are as versatile as ever, with more interests than before, simply because the occasion and opportunities allows for it. And if that makes us villains, then I guess it’s time to wear the black hats.

by Garry Lu