Why I quit Facebook and the rest of them

In 2010 I wrote a blog about how communications have changed over the ages and how we are in this age where we have really taken them to a level never imagined. This is where I catch that train of thought and roll out again.

The one thing in the story of Facebook that was captured really well in the ‘Social network’ was its founders’ character. It starts with a scene where he is sitting talking to his girlfriend and he is extremely insensitive to the point of insulting her in more ways than one. This scene was played with a background score which gave the viewer a feeling that what the protagonist did was kind of cool. This is followed by him creating a sexist website where he gets guys to rate women and blogs nasty about the girl who just dumped him. Well I have nothing against the character, after it is was only ‘inspired by’ a real person. But one trait that clearly comes out is that of insecurity. He wants to get into the prized clubs of Harvard and he is willing to do anything for that. He is genius which is a given since Harvard does not take management quota. But then the word genius has no moral binding to it. Morals themselves are the greyest areas of human imagination. So, our genius ends up building a fantastic website which then turns out to be Facebook and he is a billionaire before puberty hits him.

No one knows the true story there and I would be very insensitive myself if I pass judgement on one of the richest men in the world without true knowledge or understanding of him as a person. But one thing I can judge to my heart’s content is his product, Facebook.

Born out of an absolute sense of insecurity, this product targets that trait in every person. It does not fail and it does not falter, with all the genius coders who design the algorithms which capture every bit of the user’s life and put it out there for the world to see. It is the best place to celebrate, vent, crack a joke, cry, laugh, pass judgement, conduct media trials, express love, break up, post your pictures and appreciate everyone else’s put up there. It feels so good to have thousands of friends of friends like your pictures and status updates.

What a place to be! Over a billion users, one of every 7 people in the world today uses Facebook. You are connected to every person you’ve ever met and every person you want to meet. You have the ability to document every minute of your life and put it up on display to the world, the way you want to. It gives you that power. It allows you to cover up all your ugliness and makes you look like a star, like a person who lives an absolutely fantastic life. It gives you the power to be who you want the world to believe you are. Everyone on Facebook is their own super hero, in their own head, on their own profile page. The amazing bit is the fact that everyone wants to be everyone else they see on Facebook. When a guy posts a picture of his new BMW, you cringe in your head, though you like his picture. The next day you are putting pictures of your vacation in Europe and the guy who bought that BMW is cringing because he is paying for his car and can’t afford that vacation. Facebook is getting elephants to climb tress because the monkeys are posting pictures swinging from branches.

There is a certain obscenity to all this. It shows us how fake we all can get, how our own mind is but fooling us into feeling good when in reality it is not that good after all. Eating dinner and taking pictures of food is more about convincing yourself that what you are eating is great. And how do you get that conviction? All the likes! The world approves of what you do and that gives your insecurity a blanket. Every profile on Facebook is a fake. It is a Utopian world for self imagery. Activity on Facebook and that person’s life are inversely proportional, almost always.

What provokes me next is the number of friends people have. I did an exercise of sorting out my friends from the long list I had on my Facebook. Out of some 560 odd friends and family, I could single out exactly 43 people whose place in my life I somewhat value. And of these you could take out my parents and my girlfriend, they are one in my life, so 40 people. Drill down further and of these 40, it is just about 20 who I deeply care about. Their contribution in my life and mine is theirs is valuable and worth cherishing. Drill down further and I find that it is only about 10 whom I am regularly in touch with. By in touch with I mean a personal phone call or a face to face meet once a month at least.  The span of the human mind to relate to people for reasons beyond material benefits is just about that much, 10 people or 20 if you push it. Beyond that it is all irrelevant. It sounds harsh but it cannot be relevant to you what a person whom you met in a party many years ago is eating for lunch. You wouldn’t notice if he is dead tomorrow.

These 40 odd people in my life are the ones who matter. Of these many have moved on and even though I may not speak to them anymore, I would always acknowledge the part they played in my journey of life. The 10 I speak to now may not be the ones I speak to as much a few years hence. People move on. It is how it is supposed to be, this life. But what matters is the quality of time you have spent with these people. It is the impact that they created and the difference that they made. These are special people. I find it highly disrespectful to like a picture of one of these friends’ lunch. I value their privacy. If I wanted to know what they were eating, I would rather just go down to their house and ask for a bite myself and I am sure they would be more than happy to have me over.

What we lost when we shifted to Facebook was the romance of communication.  There is no effort of putting our minds to it when we talk on Facebook. Imagine writing a letter to a dear friend, and think of how much you would want him to feel your mind through your words. That effort is not there anymore. It is not there on Facebook and it is not there on Whatsapp. The romance of beautiful expression is lost forever.

I guess I am born in the wrong era. I seem to detest everything that consumes wastefully while the world glorifies it. With Facebook, it consumes time wastefully. Something none of us have a luxury of. So might as well stop posting what you are doing and put your mind to doing it properly. You may record a moment and share it but you can never truly live it again.

Being Human

Darwin investigated, in his life’s work, how life on earth evolved. In our sense of time, many years back, when the first humans walked on this planet, little did they know that they would be sitting on top of the food chain so soon. Homo sapiens, the dexterous species with opposing thumbs and brains that can think beyond visible and audible reality, we became the kings of the planet quite soon.

In the few thousand years of history of the great human kind, of which probably only a couple of thousand years of history are roughly documented, the progress has been at massive pace. Our ingenuity in understanding nature and rapidly exploiting resources on the planet is truly remarkable. We have moved from the Stone Age to the Space age in about 8000 odd years. The last few centuries in fact have been way more rapid. We became men of science. Physics, which started out as a means of understanding our world came into application and we built machines. We experimented with metals and elements and magnets and found electricity. We saw radio waves in our machines and built massive information and communication networks. We started flying around the globe, and onto the moon. It has been an absolutely crazy ride.

This is true progress, isn’t it?

Our race is the supreme one. Even if the earth decides to shake us off we will survive. We are men of science. We will find newer planets to live on. Just like Professor Brand said in Interstellar, ‘We will not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

Being Human, isn’t this it?

I am not quite human in that sense. I am quite anti-human rather. When the world sees progress, I see infection. It is as if the planet got infected with this species called humans after it was created by some cosmic event. Agent Smith in Matrix expresses this in a brilliant manner. He says to Morpheus ‘I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.’ Not a single untrue word in that. But we still hail Morpheus and Neo to win the battle of the species. We are choosing our race to win of course.

We are animals after all, just the most evil of them. We use our developed brains and create an illusion of the world we live in. We have a parallel reality that keeps us together and on top of the food chain. In our parallel reality we have jobs, money, governments, taxes, philosophy, society and many other things which do not exist in the actual sense of the world. What is money but paper? - A mere concept that cannot be eaten for survival or planted for growing food. It is thanks to our great imagination that our world today runs on these otherwise useless things. We in fact now have moved beyond paper and run our lives on digital bank accounts. This is as imaginary as it can get.

We produce a million cars a year, a few billion garments, a few hundred billion newspapers and a few thousand billion kilos of burnt carbon. We decorate houses in India with tulips from the Netherlands and wear clothes in America made by kids in India. Diamonds from Africa are mined and given to the rest of the world to signify love while kids in Africa kill each other with weapons bought by this diamond money. We eat Oats grown in Australia because advertisements say they keep you healthy. We sit all day long in our air conditioned offices and type away on keyboards to make money which we spend on keeping our sedentary lives healthy by eating these Oats. We build factories to produce chemical fertilizers to feed our plants so that they give more food and let these factories discharge their effluents into our rivers. We also make Water purifiers then to clean this water before we consume it. Because these water purifiers contain many tiny electrical components and UV tubes, on their end of life we dispose them off somewhere on earth. This leads to the soil becoming less fertile and so we make chemical fertilizers. This does look like some kind of a cycle and vicious would be a very mild adjective to describe it.

This little imaginary world of ours is actually killing us. We are running behind making money which in reality is alive only till we are all together in this imagination. Owning 30 pairs of shoes, just because you can, is not sane because in reality you need only one pair to protect your feet. Eating caviar in Mumbai is insane because you are killing a sturgeon fish in Russia to eat its salty raw eggs thousands of miles away. Drinking Scotch in Australia is insane because you are creating a product millions of miles away and telling yourself to savour it because the advertisements show that successful people sip on single malts. An alien sitting on the moon, looking at our planet would be laughing his ass off right now. Or he may be scared. What if this deadly infection spreads in the universe?

When the tuberculosis bacterium was first discovered, it was not too difficult to kill. We invented antibiotics that did the job very well. But overtime, the bacteria evolved and became resistant to our drugs. We then made more drugs and stronger drugs and the bacteria evolved further. Humans are going through an exactly the same phase of evolution. Every time a natural calamity comes or there is fear of extinction, we put all our resources into survival. We do not die. We invent new technology to keep us alive. We evolve. We are in our bubble, feeling right on top of this world, but in the larger scheme of the universe, we are merely a deadly virus which consumes off its host planet and moves on to the next. We also feel very proud of us while we do that. We feel proud that the human race will always progress and someday colonize other planets. It is in our genetic make up to feel good about multiplying and consuming. It is also what is taught to us as we grow up. We work all our lives trying to give ourselves worldly pleasures which involve consuming the planet’s resources and we are genetically greedy so it is never enough.

That alien will surely try to kill us, eradicate us like we do to bacteria and rodents. In my opinion he would be right in doing so. He is trying to keep his house clean. He probably belongs to some other star system nearby and has identified that in the next 500 years this human race will be onto Mars and probably identifying more planets to colonize. He may be like us too. He may have a highly noble image of himself in his mind where he is thinking of preservation of his species by eradication of humans. His species would probably be like us humans just way more advanced and larger in scale, eating up bigger planets and galaxies. Maybe it is all destined to be eaten up by hungry directionless nincompoops who think they have inherited the universe.

It does seem truly depressing. But the nature of us humans is that way, like it or not. Is there a way we can get out of this vicious cycle? I believe there is. But for that we have to fight our most basic urges of wanting more. There has to be satisfaction in owning what we do and knowing what we know. So do we stop all progress as we call it today? I think we need to revisit our definition of progress. Progress should not mean having great industry or great cities, but it rather should be measured by how much we do to preserve the planet we live on. At any point, if a natural resource is being depleted, we need to measure our progress against how efficiently are we refilling it. It is about achieving that balance between earth and ourselves. Having a fantastic city should not mean a city where everyone owns cars. It should rather mean a city where no one has to own a car. Prosperity in the family should not mean having the money to buy fruits imported from a distant country, but rather to have the ability to grow fruits in their own backyard and hand pick them for daily meals. It should not be about how many air miles you have on your card but rather how many steps you have on your pedometer. The money in your account should be of any value only if it is put to use to help localize resources for consumption and not the other way around. This in my mind would be true progress, a progress where we sustain our civilization for a far longer time on this planet, and sustain the planet far beyond our existence. Our species would be remembered for being amiable, symbiotic and in a deep rooted cosmic connection with this universe. Being one with the universe would then have a literal connotation. That alien sitting on our moon watching us would tell the other living beings in the universe how amazing this green and blue planet in the solar system is. And that would be when I would be truly proud of being human.

The Edge of the World

Millions of miles away in the hills with thick snow, in a hut on the bank of a nearly frozen lake sat an old man. He sat on a chair as rickety as him. There was a grave sense of age that anyone who saw him strangely felt. It was like he had been living since forever. No one ever saw him though. No one in the world truly knew he existed.

He sat there on the chair and worked on his table with a huge book. He enjoyed writing. He was scribbling slowly, making sure every word he wrote was etched into paper. He waited and saw every drop of ink being absorbed by the paper, feeling the letter take shape before he moved on. So steady was his hand that the cold wind from the window warmed up as it passed him. He had an effortless grace to his writing.

'Hello! Is anyone home?' Came a sound breaking into the silence. It was like shattering glass, breaking the sound barrier and hitting your ears so hard that they would bleed.

The old man was unmoved. It was as if he knew there was going be someone at the door. He kept his pen down and stood up. He moved his chair and walked to the door, steady steps , noiselessly. He could have might as well floated. He opened the door to see a young man, barely standing, shivering in the cold. His warm clothing clearly not able to hold his body heat, it looked like his heart would have frostbite. The man stumbled inside without saying a word. He dropped his near frozen body near the fireplace. The old man closed the door.

The heat was like the antidote. He could feel his body drink it down like it was a parched desert and rain fell on it. It had a been a few hours. 'Thank you, I couldn't have been closer to death but I live because of you' the young man muttered, barely audible.

The old man was back at his chair doing what he had been doing. He did not respond. After finishing the letter he had started etching, he looked back and acknowledged the stranger's presence. 'It is good to see someone come around.' Said the old man. His voice was ruffled and filled with growls. The young man saw the face and felt sad. He felt he was seeing into something prehistoric. The eyes were endlessly deep. The beard and the hair had grayed like it had worn out over hundreds of years. He was looking at the past beyond his comprehension.

He stood up with an effort. 'Who are you and why do you live here? I almost killed myself just to get to this edge of the world. It's impossible to come here even with all the plans and tools and you actually live here. I cannot fathom this. I am surely dreaming'. The old man looked at the boy. His face was glowing red in the heat of the fire. 'It is what it has to be. You could not be away from reality. This is the most real that you can ever get, we can ever get.'

The boy made and effort and walked to the old man. He peered down at the thick binding of paper on which the old mans hand held the pen. The handwriting was even, warm and smelled like fresh cakes out of the oven. The boy began reading from the top of the page of the big binding of paper. He had to stretch out onto it to get his eyes to focus on the top of the big book. He read a few long lines moving his head not just his eyes to keep up with the width of the page. After a few lines he looked a the old man who now was sitting looking at the boy read. 'I haven't read anything more fascinating than this in my life. It is like reading through life itself. You must be a genius to be able to even construct words this way. I think I am going to read the whole book, if you permit me that is.' The old man smiled. 'So you do not know it yet.' He said, then took a pause just of the right amount to allow for a measured gulp of air to fill his lungs. Just enough for him to say the next few words. 'Read it if you that is what you want. You have earned every right to. You are the only person who has come to this place at the edge of the world.'

The boy lifted his eyes again and began to read the last page again where he had left off. After a few hours he was on the final few words. 'Why does this end in darkness? It is like you have given up on it. You have ended this book and given it a cold and dark end. It cannot be so sad. There has to be a better way.' He looked up as he did this. The hut was empty. The old man was gone. The boy looked outside the window. The old man was moving slowly into the lake. He whispered in the silence, 'read it completely and then write it the way you would have wanted it to end.' The words flew over and the boy felt them enter his consciousness. He saw the old man enter the water and walk into it until he disappeared. Then fell the darkness. It was the darkest it had ever been, like looking into a big bottomless hole.

The boy looked down the thick book. The candle next to the book felt like the sun in that vast emptiness. With a massive effort he turned it right to the first page and settled down in the chair to read it from the beginning.

'Let there be light' is how it started.