Every day at work, Bao Minh spends only two hours creating posts for his company’s social media with ChatGPT and the remaining six hours on watching movies.
The sad thing to me is that they’ve created six hours a day of time to do something constructive, and they use it to watch movies. That’s the real tragedy of our current society, in my opinion. People want their own time to do something “meaningful,” but very often they don’t honestly know what that is, and instead they just burn their life away being fed the dopamine-hitting, passive consumption that characterizes modern life. I worry the younger generations of millennials and z (of which I’m part) are going to have a serious, wide-spread, paralyzing existential crisis that makes the current malaise and apathy look like the “good times.” People are going to look up from their phones when they turn 50 and realize they spent their whole life waiting for their “real life” to begin.
Reminds me of The Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
The sad thing to me is that they’ve created six hours a day of time to do something constructive, and they use it to watch movies. That’s the real tragedy of our current society, in my opinion. People want their own time to do something “meaningful,” but very often they don’t honestly know what that is, and instead they just burn their life away being fed the dopamine-hitting, passive consumption that characterizes modern life. I worry the younger generations of millennials and z (of which I’m part) are going to have a serious, wide-spread, paralyzing existential crisis that makes the current malaise and apathy look like the “good times.” People are going to look up from their phones when they turn 50 and realize they spent their whole life waiting for their “real life” to begin.
Reminds me of The Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Far out, that’s poignant. 45m and relating hard
In fairness, I’m working quite hard and fantasising about being able to ‘check out’, so my scenario is more one of burnout rather than ‘not ignited’