After an initial entry describing some basic aspects of viruses and two entries on how our society was when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, it is time to look a bit deeper into some of the vulnerabilities in our societies that the pandemic has brought to life. The previous entries were looking at the past, while here I intend to add some ideas on how to re-define our lives once the pandemic is over.
For today, we will get started with selfishness,
something I touched upon slightly in the previous entry of this blog.
From selfies to selfishness
One of the main words added to our vocabulary in the
last years has been “selfie”, intended to define a photo taken of oneself with
our own mobile phone. It should be placed in a special location or while we are
doing something particularly interesting. In many cases, the selfie is uploaded
to social media to show others our achievement.
Unfortunately, too often the selfie is more important
than the experience itself. For instance, it is particularly sad to travel to
Thailand and to end up queuing for a photo to upload in social media: https://twistedsifter.com/2018/07/when-you-look-and-see-fellow-instagram-boyfriends/.
The importance of selfies in our society highlights
also the extraordinary focus on ourselves and on appearance in our society. On
the former, it is actually a small step from “selfie” to “selfishness”.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the tremendous
degree of selfishness that is inhabiting within our societies. Before the
pandemic, it was possible to find some clues of this behaviour: it was not
common to allow the elderly to sit in the underground, going shopping with a
baby exposed the father/mother to a waterfall of disapproving grins from others
(I have some experience on this) and many people were engaged in a strange race
for success in terms of number of connections, likes, marathons run or
whatever.
The consideration of the needs of the others came to
the background, becoming much less important than the needs of the person.
There was not a feeling of “toghetherness”, of acting together to make a better
society, as everything was focused on the person and its own profits and needs.
Our freedom was taken for granted and it was more important than anything else.
This societal behaviour resulted in a poor response to the pandemic in its first
months, where governments did not dare to ask their citizens a small sacrifice to
fight the newly discovered virus.
For example, no government was considering imposing
restrictions to travelling in early 2020, despite the warnings that were come
from China about the new virus. It was at that time unthinkable to restrict the
possibility to travel around the world just because of the outbreak of a new
virus. How could I not travel from Germany to USA just because there is a virus
in China?
A perfect world
I have also mentioned above the focus on appearance,
on pretending to be somebody with a perfect life. Social media are full of perfect
photos, where somebody is perfectly dressed in a wonderful place, enjoying life
and sharing it happily with others. I guess that the initial idea was something
like “I am feeling so happy that I want to share a small bit of it with the
people I love”. Furthermore, people called “influencers” are becoming idols for
showing themselves in social media doing things.
Unfortunately, reality is sadder than the perception
we get through our eyes. In many occasions, that is just a fake representation
of life, a desperate cry for attention or just a good instance of a
materialistic life. So, the storyline goes towards something like “I am working
one hour to prepare a cool photo to post in social media so that people can see
how cool I am and approve me being in the world”.
In general, imperfections are not allowed, failure is
a shame. Everybody is portraited as successful and achieving all types of
ambitious goals through hard work and a lot of talent: “through my hard
training and thanks to many people who helped me over the last months, I managed
to become a licensed driver of automobiles” or “excited to share my forthcoming
trip in an automated machine taking me from the ground floor to the 17th
floor of a wonderful building designed by the best designers”. It sounds ridiculous,
but not unrealistic.
Collectively, our society is a society of unhappy people
pretending to be the happiest and most successful on Earth. Depression is a
silent pandemic in our times, particularly among women (I will speak about this
later on).[1]
The amount of hate, intolerance and envy unveiled in social media is not what
one would expect from an idyllic society. Our efforts to “fit in” and to avoid
being stigmatised by others evidence that “something is rotten” in our
societies.
Obviously, a global pandemic requires certain degree
of solidarity and sacrifice of the individuals, towards a common objective. It
also entails to fight a metaphorical war against the virus, including, as
always, defeats and unpleasant experiences. Not something that could be easily
obtained in the scenario described above.
In the next entry, I will discuss our information-era,
which, contrary to what was expected, has not produced more intelligent
populations. This is an essential discussion to understand our collective
response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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