The narrator of this video is the biggest horse's ass you're going to meet today. For instance, he thinks Instagram is changing the way we think about our lives. And also, he's just a horse's ass.
But he is right about one thing: We do spend a hell of a lot of time these days reflecting on time, and how fast it's moving.
The problem is, that's what people do when they're on vacation. It wastes their time and it doesn't make the vacation last any longer.
It seems to me—even to me, a fellow who has a fast-receeding young daughter he adores and who knows very well that these are the good old days—that we think altogether too frequently about the passing of time, and achieve precious little in the meantime, to make the time count.
We fetishize "back in the day," but our cultural memory is so short that "the day" we're talking about was 20 years ago. Go back just a teeny-weeny bit firther, and meet some old-school ancestors who had their fucking hands full. Henry Ford didn't have time for Instagramming, and neither did any of his workers, who weren't even allowed to go to the bathroom. Nor did the workers' wives, who cleaned and cooked from dawn until dusk. Or even their children, who worked too. You know why those people went to church? To rest, and to think, for the first time all week.
Every last bit of the freedom we've achieved through our civilizing regulations and technological achievements, we've eagerly handed over to TV, Facebook, Instragram and YouTube. When my old man was in the prime of his career, he taught himself how to take exquisite photographs, developed them in his dark room and fly airplanes! We don't have hobbies anymore, because we're not interested in anything anymore. We're pinterested, at best.
We while away the hours tweeting truculently about politicians who seem to have their own best interest in mind, between their constant speechifying, fund-raising and unceasing self-promotion. Well at least they put in an honest day's work! What do you have to show for your last year at work? For your last five?
Where am I going with this? How about here: Show me someone who is spending even the smallest unit of humanity's collective time on earth trying to put a sepia filter onto a photograph that was taken yesterday to add nostalgic gravitas to his Saturday brunch, and I'll show you someone whose bank account ought to be seized by the government and who ought to be trucked off to pick fruit under a hot sun.
That's a lot of us, I'm talking about—ranging all the way from myself to the self-licking douche bag who made that Instagram video.
Really, everyone would be better off if we all found some useful work to do.
But what?
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