The New You

It is like talking to a mosaic. A scrambled image making scrambled noises, the sounds themselves reaching your ears with the quality of sparkling sonic pixels. Pixels! The edges are square, the sounds have a noisy, jagged quality. Perhaps noise is just fragments. And signal is an assembled audio artifact, something we can hear that makes sense to us. But enough of that, the metaphor has gone too far.

Our minds are changing. At least I think they are anyways, that's what it feels like. The more I'm on the internet, the more I listen to new music, experience new media, I can feel it rearranging my wiring. Slowly, subtly, but it's there.

Our communication mediums reach into our wiring. We change along with the rest of the culture, down to the very circuitry. There was once a sadness. I felt hurt interacting with the new human, it felt strange, tragic somehow, as if we were being deformed. But that is going away. It was never the new human that was tragic. It was the strained communication.

That must be the discomfort the elderly experience. To get rid of the unease, they blame the new generation, they say things aren't quite the way they used to be. The kids are different now. They don't have respect, or humility, or some other trait. But the real problem is the communication breakdown. Between slightly incongruent psychological topographies. There is a dissonance.

And maybe that is the nature of a new consciousness being born. First, noisy chaos. Mosaic images, jagged noise, distracted youth, their minds split in all sorts of different directions. A whole lot of dissonance happens as rough edges grind against each other. But slowly the fragments, through repetition and organizational work, will reassemble, and a new image will take shape. Then we will have to shatter it yet again when it has gone stale.

So it seems. It is hard to even think, to reason in a state such as this. And it is hard to communicate. People's attention spans just a few seconds, their inner lives still idiosyncratic. Terrified of the silence that could fall amidst a conversation. The pain of beginning to think again.

Watching things freeze and thaw, organize and disperse, we know that yes, coherence takes work. And we will no longer lean on that previous consciousness that has been so hollowed out by consumerist vacuousness. This is a fascinating new world. Coming to shape as our very minds come to terms with it.

We desire a free existence without self-conscious fear, without the burden of self judgement, but still, we have to check ourselves to make sure we rebuild right. Finding a balance is really most of the work.

And further up the spiral we go.