Stanisland Magazine

In searching for relevance, are we quite possibly becoming irrelevant to ourselves?

In our current state of existence, we are unknowingly treading towards a crisis.

Driven by easy access to everything from a tiny pocket device we carry with us at all times, our sense of reality is becoming warped by ideas and skewed philosophies we do not necessarily need, governed by code and remote input.

From the moment we wake up

It commences at the beginning of the day, from the moment we wake, ending only when we close our eyes. True currency is time, and smartphones are thieves. Their use is becoming increasingly difficult to circumvent, with its intuitive and almost robot-like biological circulatory systems itching to chip away autonomously at the behest of its human overlords.

We all share desires to feel relevant and dissectable by society through a need to be simultaneously loved and alone.

Take the Myers-Briggs test with a pinch of salt

In the past 5 years, the profile of terms like ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ have been overused to the point they have become meaningless.

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator which catalysed its use, became a popularised form of self-identification, yet holds little significance within the scientific community due to its lack of evidence.

The test was created and formulated by the same company who underwrote its research, raising questions about its validity and legitimacy. Today, the parameters of its findings are used in levity and has gained traction as a way to classify oneself.

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Independent of this we are influenced by what society projects upon us through an excessive amount of mixed media messaging, particularly socials. The archetypes of ‘introvert’ vs ‘extrovert’ are broadly misunderstood, their complexities cherry-picked to assimilate one’s identity and most assumably to belong to something if one feels abandoned.

READ: Have We Forgotten How To Have Fun?

In the quest to feel part of a party without knowing which one that is, we forgo the nourishment of one’s own existence. This leads us astray by the peer pressure of investigation for pertinence.

The accomplice of social media – ‘smartphones’ hammered out a baseline for who we are, nailing faux dispositions into ways of thinking without asking us to comprehend its outcomes. Like a parasitic wasp, we are unable to see the shortcomings of our choices, mostly because we are unaware we are within the grasp of something so nefariously unimportant, trapped within the midpoint of an algorithm searching for the breaches of an identity we did not need in order to feel needed.

We are so swept up in trying to pin a slice of importance to our bio, that we neglect the necessity of importance in what we can do without our smartphones.

Our true selves are dissident to the norms of society, a society that is constantly changing the parameters of normality, unhinged from the chambers of voracious intent and instead bound by the fluctuations of horde mentality. One that is destined for mental malnourishment.

Image by Bob May is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.