Busy, busy lives

Do you remember what you ate for lunch yesterday? Remember what you did last bank holiday? I bet you woke up early, got hurriedly dressed, grabbed a coffee to-go somewhere, and barely made it to work on time. You sat on your office chair, replied a few emails, left for lunch with a coworker, and didn’t actually consider what you had in your plate. You turned on auto-pilot, ate while talking about work, and then checked if anything had changed in your social media.

I do the same things most of my days. And that makes me wonder if we’ve become functional robots who just go from task to task, from chore to chore, never actually focusing on what’s really happening.

It’s as if we could split the world into two distinct personalities: the ones on autoplay, and the ones who are extremely specific. Where’s the midterm? Where’s the standard, acceptable people who may not remember what they ate for dinner last night, but who can connect to other special moments?

Some say we haven’t been living, but rather simply existing. After the digital transformation, we can’t even remember our own passwords - because we don’t need to remember them, since they’re stored in our smartphones. Phone numbers by heart, what’s that?

That’s digital amnesia, folks. And it happens because we trust our digital devices are capable of keeping it all in, managing our data for us, using the cloud for it, and putting our memories to rest, weakening it, deactivating it. We’ve also got the corporate amnesia, leaded by the Millenials, who are somewhere in between the ages of 20 and 30, and don’t think about retiring anywhere. They want to let down their hair, travel the world, work for a few months in order to get the money they need for their current goal, and go for it. They don’t want to spend years and years of their lives working for the same people, they want to grow, to think outside the box.

The subject came to play in 2018, when some people started talking about future trends in some specific segments such as design, fashion, gastronomy, and behavior in general. What we now call slow future proposed a complete slowdown when it comes to important aspects of our lives - feeding, dressing, acting… parameters that have completely changed.

That’s all to say that our several amnesias are caused by ourselves. We allow that to happen, we use our phones to memorize our passwords, we stopped paying attention to what we put in our plates, we opted for leading an ultra fast routine.

The thing is, the least we put our brain to work, the bigger the chances we bury it sooner. It’s not just about our passwords or post codes, it’s mainly about the moments we go through. It’s about looking at a friend and paying attention to the conversation, without checking our devices every two minutes.

It’s paying attention to life itself, because that’s going fast, and there’s no replay. Life is here and now.