Mundane Humanity

I assert that the invention of the selfie is the fount of discord.  I’m not alleging that before the advent of selfies that we lived in a harmonious utopian society.  Perhaps what I mean to say is the selfie is the fount of the exacerbation of discord.  “The great divide”- The illusion of extreme polarization that plagues us in current times.

​I’m not one who buys into that particular myth, but the very existence of the myth is the heart of the matter here.  And the selfie is my metaphorical scapegoat for the larger problem that we have ceased to interact with one another.  It used to be (and I am plenty old enough to remember), then when you wished to have your photo taken in front of some wonder of the world, you would ask a someone else to take it.  You would interact with a stranger.

Or if you were lost, say, in a foreign town, you would stop and ask a stranger for directions.  Or if you were baking and were a bit short of sugar, you would walk over to the neighbor’s house with your cup and ask if they might lend you a bit of sugar.  And then later, you might bring them a cookie or two as thanks. Or if your were stopped on the side of the road for any reason, a local would stop to offer assistance.

My point is that we used to interact with each other in a human capacity over mundane things.  Human things. And technology, as convenient as we find it, has removed this need for each other.  Without such need, we can easily fail to see the sameness in each other.  We don’t see the smiling neighbor who graciously lets us into their home to borrow a cup of sugar, or the kind stranger who does their best to take a great photo of us in front of the corn palace, or the nice lady who gives us directions in the local dialect that includes things such as “where the Piggly Wiggly used to be”, or the helpful local who stops to help us change a flat tire.  And we don’t get to be the smiling neighbor, or the kind stranger, or the nice lady, or the helpful local.

Without these mundane commonalities, it becomes frighteningly easy to put each other into mythical boxes.  This one is red. This one is blue. As if that were the entirety of our composition.  I, for one, think I am larger than my political beliefs.  In fact, I think my political beliefs-which waver and change over time and with new information and experiences (they are called “beliefs” for a reason, after all)-make up only a tiny portion of who I am.  I am also the smiling neighbor, the kind stranger, the nice lady, and the helpful local. And I’m betting you are too.  But now, with our faces glued to our devices (chasing our own tails in our social media echo chambers), and our needs met by technology, the people around us become two-dimensional without our ever looking up to notice. When we fail to notice these plebeian congruences, it is the metaphorical tip of the iceberg.  If we don’t see the tip, we most assuredly cannot fathom the depths of similarities between us hidden below the surface.

I am not asserting this from some high horse.  I am just as guilty. Why just today I passed a clean white Cadillac Escalade stopped on the side of the road without stopping to offer assistance.  It wasn’t until I was halfway down the road that I realized I had subconsciously made the assumption that they did not need my help and wouldn’t have appreciated my offer to do so. Maybe I could have helped, maybe not? Maybe they would have appreciated it, maybe not.  But even an offer to help would have been more human connection than simply driving on by under my assumptions, without stopping to consider the actual real humans inside that car..

Technology has altered our brains and it’s going to take a herculean effort to remember our own three-dimensionality, put down the phone, and once again interact with strangers. To find again our mundane human commonalities and to let each other out of the boxes we've forged for one another. My selfies are never any good anyway.

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