After all, is that not dying to the present moment – moving on from it? Is a man thinking about the future not but a ghost, dwelling neither here nor there? When you’re in a group of friends and something insightful or funny is said, phones are whipped out and passionate mutters of “Tweet-worthy” are heard all around, everyone has removed themselves from the present moment and thrust their experience out to the world to be validated.
Thought Experiment: If you Facebooked/tweeted/blogged/shared the greatest moment of your life and no one ‘liked’ it, would you think less of the moment? Would you think less of your friends? Is either option any good? Is ‘liking’ something on Facebook actually ‘liking’ it, or is it usually validating that it exists, i.e. “Yes, you did say/post that.”?
That’s not at all to say things shouldn’t be shared, but we share them like words on a tombstone, brief summations of the life of the thing – that really amount to its death. Why? Because as soon as we move from the event to the status update, when we give the event a small conglomerate of signs and symbols that by their nature as words cannot fully describe – hence, “you had to be there” – we make our events small, and then we are done with them. We try and make ourselves, in some strange way, the victors of that moment. Our experience has been wrestled into submission by our adjectives.
It is definitely worth reading, which you can do here.
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