Summary

The text discusses the impact of digital media on the human experience, particularly the rise of immediacy and the hyper-simplification of reality, which contribute to an age of obscurantism and a distorted sense of truth and understanding.

Abstract

The author reflects on the current state of society, characterizing our era as one marked by obscurantism, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The immediacy brought about by the digital revolution, especially social media, has transformed human interactions and the concept of self, leading to a culture of instant gratification and a fragmented sense of community. The essay argues that this immediacy has eroded our ability to engage deeply with ideas and with each other, fostering a culture where subjective truths prevail over objective realities. The author suggests that the hyper-simplification of reality, a byproduct of our reluctance to engage with complexity, hinders our growth and understanding. Despite the challenges, the author does not dismiss the value of knowledge but encourages a continuous pursuit of understanding, acknowledging that the search for meaning is an infinite journey.

Opinions

The author believes that the advent of social media has intensified a culture of instant gratification and immediacy, which has negatively impacted real-life interactions and the human experience.
They posit that social media, despite its intention to connect people, has paradoxically led to increased feelings of isolation and a self-centered culture.
The text suggests that the concept of truth has been diluted into subjective opinions, a result of the hyper-simplification of reality where complexity is avoided in favor of preconceived notions and stereotypes.
The author argues for the importance of thinking critically and reflectively, asserting that life's meaning is found not in definitive answers but in the ongoing quest for understanding.
The essay implies that the overuse of digital media has contributed to an obscurantist age, where the depth of human experience is compromised by the oversimplification of complex issues.
The author encourages readers to become members of Medium to support writers who contribute insights daily, and also promotes an AI service, ZAI.chat, as a cost-effective alternative to ChatGPT Plus (GPT-4).

Philosophy | Society | Life

On the Hyper-Simplification of Reality

Thoughts on the immediacy we live in

The age of obscurantism

It seems clear that we live, nowadays, in an age of obscurantism. Something that the covid-19 pandemic has only aggravated.

This obscurantism comes from the way we receive, treat, and process the information that comes to us about the world. In other words, this obscurantism is born from what it is to be human. The experience of the human.

Not being a philosopher, anthropologist, or sociologist, I am, in principle, a human, which allows me to say one or two things about it.

Do we have a “new human”?

The experience of being human has changed radically in recent years with the introduction and massification of the digital world, namely social media. As the name implies, the social experience between people has changed.

One of the differences that seem clearest to me is the immediacy that has been generated.

I was born in 1996. If I already thought that my generation and its “sisters” were people of instant gratification, with little waiting time to achieve a goal, the advent of social networks only intensified this situation.

And, obviously, as the human experience changes in the digital world, so does real life. This immediacy has taken over our lives and our interactions.

What If We Create a New Humanity?

Thoughts on The Evolution of the Species

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The problem of immediacy

Concentration on a physical conversation is reduced, with the eagerness to get to the moment of response to shine. The laughter will be the real-life likes of what we have said. We probably don’t even think much about the phrase, but we have to be sure that it is controversial enough to provoke reactions in others.

And our ego thus receives the massage that we have become accustomed to receiving in the digital world. Because social media has intensified the culture of the self in a way that I, at least, have never witnessed in 26 years.

Mark Zuckerberg says that his goal was to bring the world closer together, when in fact, and as far as the human world is concerned, it has only driven it apart.

I have the feeling that people have never before met so many people but, at the same time, have never felt so alone.

And alone because not only do they live in the culture of me, me, me, but they isolate themselves within a complex tangle of beliefs and opinions, a broth of subjectivity so deep that it creates a dissociation between the real and the imagined.

We Need to Think Slowly

The cure for the immediacy

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The concept of truth and the hyper-simplification of reality

Let’s think about the truth: today truth, the concept of truth, has fallen into disuse. Today there is subjective truth, each person’s opinion. This opinion is generated in a brutal hyper-simplification of reality. So, what is this hyper-simplification of reality, anyway?

Thinking costs a lot. It takes a lot of work and takes us out of the comfort zone that is to walking on an already paved path, even if it is a bumpy one.

We create preconceptions and formulate stereotypes that we then apply in a uniform way to the world, without taking the time to try to understand its complexity. The complexity of each thing in itself can lead us to grow. After all, we grow, I think, when we allow ourselves to step outside the form of beliefs and ideas that we are.

I am not, by this, passing a certificate of uselessness to the knowledge acquired. The fact that I know about the existence of the law of gravity saves my life, in that I don’t throw myself out of a window for fear of dying.

This is, by the way, a reason to accept that life is not a set of pre-defined solutions. We have to, at every moment, think, and reflect, to make the best possible decision, and even the concept of best is ours and defined by us.

The meaning of life

But when we hyper-simplify reality to the point of reducing it to an identity discourse (on both sides of the barricade), or reducing it to preconceived categories of subjects, because “politicians are all the same”, or “women are like this”, or “men are like that”, we fail in what should be human experience at its peak: a search for total understanding of the meaning of life.

And that total understanding, an unattainable dream of those who devote their lives to searching for a theory of everything, is a perpetual path of not reaching, something that guides us in the experience of being human to the very end, even with the notion that we will never achieve total understanding.

And perhaps it is in this paradox where the meaning of life lies: to seek perfection is to walk towards infinity.

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