What did people used to do with their time? Work. Work the fields, work the forest, work the hunt, work the fire, work the shelter, work to survive, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, year after year, until that one bad year decimates your community, &or until you die, like everyone else who has ever lived died.
And now, the modern human bitches, endlessly, about how spending a very-tight eight hours a day, five days per seven-day week, is unethical? That living beyond one's means is the fault of the one who distributes the pay. Understanding that you're a slave, yet you do nothing, economically, to attempt/buy your own freedom. Instead, you spend the only thing that can save you. You take your pay and immediately shovel that money back into the companies that supposedly pay you so poorly. For what? Social clout on your swamp socials?
I do not understand this world in which we currently live.
And then I realize that people never had "extra time" to "burn."
Or did they? And what would they do with that time back in ancient history? Hard to say. Nobody really wrote things down until we started writing things down, so human history is murky, at best, lost, in reality.
Have you ever heard someone say something to the effect of, "Yea, I've got an hour to burn." Literally, this person has so much time on their hands, that yes, they can effectively do nothing of any true or perceived value for ONE WHOLE HOUR or ten minutes or days, depending on the experience you've had with this particular way that humans are. Like having so much money that you can literally burn some of it without feeling pain, they can figuratively burn TIME.
This is the modern* human.
We, as modern humans of These United Colonies of Elitism, have time, aplenty, on our hands. The ways in which we spend that time matters more than how much of it we have. And the way (note: singular) in which we, as a society, spend that time, is on social media. Literally, we spend most of our time alone, watching other people. Imagine how this would work out in humanity's past. It wouldn't really, because to have other people in your sights meant that those people were physically in your presence, so there was no "I'm watching you while you're not seeing me," sorta experience. If I'm seeing you see me, you're seeing me see you see me. I'm not talking about whatever perverts existed back in ancient history who wanted to spy on others, etc.
There's nothing more isolating than seeing without being seen.
Not to mention how much time we all spend looking at ourselves, being obsessed with our image, our brand, our personality, the way we come off through a screen, to a stranger, the voyeur who watches without engaging or wanting you to know that they're even there, watching, like a fucking freak. These are weird fucking times in which we are currently living, as a very social species that requires social connection. We require social mingling so much, in fact, that you are deemed "abnormal" when you are not socialized "well," etc.
My theory is that most of us feel like we don't have enough time, because what we want is to think about ourselves, all the time, and since we have to job and do dishes and clean poop (not me, obviously, the idea of cleaning poop is why I don't have kids or a dog) we are deprived of time to roll around in our own egos (i.e., swamp in our socials), because we want to roll around in that catnip all day long and give our egos a nice long stroke. And so, for some of us, some days leave us with zero time for an ego toke. Other days, when we are oh-so free and have an entire day to ourselves or an hour to burn, what do we do? We spend all that "free time" in our social swamps, making content for the swamp, ingesting the swamp.
And our socials are completely digital! A figment.
And the psychological crunch is weeding out those who cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with these Tech Times.
And it's sad that the evolution of humanity depends on one's ability to no longer need physical human social connection and that to do so well comes with financial rewards, The Hollows, aka influencing.
It's been a long time since I wondered what was wrong with the world. It's so obvious from where the harm stems, and yet, to do anything about it would be disastrous (for other people, not me, cause not a penny of my financial well being stems from social media), in a wholly different way.
To suffer the crime or awaken through the punishment. Is that the question?
*again, this piece is not about everything, as it is specifically about the economic class that These United Colonies of Elitism deems the ever-shrinking "middle."