only one

last night i read this article.

i highly suggest you read it. a lot of things rang true - and i couldn't help but imagine a future 20 years from now in which all of these modern social phenomena were amplified far beyond their current levels. i will be totally honest here - my life is described fairly accurately in the article. i do not have many close friends anymore.. i never had a ton but i certainly have less today than i did 5 years ago. i always chalked that up to growing up, getting a full time job and moving around quite a bit. now i wonder if it is because the internet has allowed me to have a watered down social experience at my fingertips - without all of the annoyances and the threat of rejection.

it is not only the availability of the internet as a social replacement that has effected our human networks - the media and the government's exploitation of fear, urban centers and subsequent immense populations of people, and lack of a national identity have all played their part.

little is being done to reverse this trend - and americans now have less close friends than ever before. are we slowly drifting towards a future filled with hundreds of acquaintances - but no close confidants? will we even need these types of intimate relationships in a future in which you will be a speck in an ocean of interconnected minds?

i also find myself more and more easily annoyed by people. in my opinion, this is a dynamic phenomenon in which people disregard those around them (due to the sheer number of other human beings in their community) and in which people have the option of tuning out these "others" through the internet, television, etc and are therefore less tolerant when going out into public. the bottom line is that our brain simply cannot handle the amount of people that we encounter on a day to day basis.. and in order to combat this we view the "others" more as objects than people.

i don't know how to fix this.. i don't want to be so annoyed by people but the bottom line is that billions of people out there barely view me as a person.. so they are not going to treat me all that well and they WILL annoy me. and i will annoy them too. i can continue to try and escape this by retreating into technology and forming vapid online "relationships" as a replacement or i can .. do what exactly? move to a small town with no more than 150 people so that my brain does not a'splode?

[on a side note: i also think that people who have an unhealthy obsession with celebrity gossip are also doing the same thing in terms of retreating from society into these pseudo relationships.]

this is an old problem.. and really is nothing new. what is new is our methods of escaping this dilemma that has been plaguing man since the fertile crescent. 15 years ago you had to go to Blockbuster to rent a movie.. now we have Netflix. 15 years ago you had to go to the grocery store to buy some mik.. now we have Fresh Direct (well in NYC). Commerce has been transplanted onto your laptop and let's face it - we are required to leave our apartments less and less. Entertainment, social interaction, material goods can all be obtained without leaving your home - and why should you want to leave when you are bound to be annoyed by someone out there?