BLURRED lives

With­out barely notic­ing it, we are rou­tinely doing two things (or even more) at the same time. I don’t mean hav­ing the TV on in our houses, as Juan Goyti­solo called it, “Span­ish­ing on” in the back­ground like in a typ­i­cal bar here.

What I con­tin­u­ally no­tice is that our daily lives are an ac­tion movie of dri­ving while tex­ting, tex­ting while watch­ing TV, watch­ing while screen-scrolling, scrolling while not lis­ten­ing to our com­pan­ions.

With­out ques­tion­ing, our species silently changes what we do. Only 25 years ago, the phone had a fixed place in the hall­way. Now it’s wher­ever we go. Some use it to shop at mid­night or gam­ble and si­mul­ta­ne­ously watch sport. We ex­pe­ri­ence a col­lec­tive near-ad­dic­tion to the stim­u­la­tion that tech­nol­ogy pro­vides and this means that we are caught in our own man-made bub­ble of fix­a­tion, at work, at home and in be­tween.

Piled on top of this, per­sonal iden­ti­ties are more and more un­de­fined. The more fash­ion­able among us are flex­i­tar­ian, pan-sex­ual. What was pri­vate is now openly pub­lic. We are selfie-su­per­mod­els: sil­i­con titty down-shots and dick-picks for the under 30s. Even what was some­one else’s body can now be yours. There are women you can find wear­ing hair ex­ten­sions from an un­known Chi­nese stranger.

Some do the op­po­site and cling to iden­tity. I’m my race, let’s leave Eu­rope, get out of MY coun­try, “walls are good things, barbed wire can be beau­ti­ful” says Trump, “eat my shorts” says Homer Simp­son.

And who still has a 20th cen­tury-style job? The blur­ring of life-lines has of course crossed over into the world of em­ploy­ment. Oh, you’re a con­sul­tant? He’s free­lance, she’s a temp/in­tern/trainee and that kid makes big money from play­ing com­puter games. The rest of them all have zero-hours con­tracts.

In fact at this mo­ment in time, my own in­come comes from seven dif­fer­ent sources. I’m a teacher/jour­nal­ist/trans­la­tor/au­thor and oc­ca­sional re­cip­i­ent of parental fi­nan­cial help...at age 50. I cur­rently go to how many dif­fer­ent work lo­ca­tions? Apart from my own home, which is also a work­place, the an­swer is: 10. That is over five days. Imag­ine, too, how many more it would be for a truck-dri­ver, a De­liv­eroo bike-rider, a home-shop­ping de­liv­erer or an Ama­zon door-to-door courier.

Added to creep­ing un­cer­tainty and the old ways being so far gone, across this frag­mented so­ci­ety there are “a mil­lion mu­tinies now,” as the au­thor VS Naipual once wrote. To un­con­sciously fight against the dis­ap­pear­ance of any real cer­tainty in our lives, in­ter­nal re­ac­tions are made into ac­tions. Gay bash­ing, wife-bash­ing, woman-hat­ing, im­mi­grant-hat­ing, Mus­lim-hat­ing, Jew-bat­ing, tail-gat­ing, restau­rant-rat­ing, bomb-mak­ing, piss-tak­ing, muck-rak­ing, re­al­ity-fak­ing. All with the mo­men­tum of a mud­slide that doesn’t want to stop.

And what are we now scared of? Not the bul­lies. Plenty of peo­ple are fright­ened of the failed-econ­omy’s vic­tims. Peo­ple with next-to-noth­ing: refugees, the home­less, beg­gars. We are not afraid of the un­known (giant multi­na­tional com­pa­nies, face­less bil­lion­aires. They are all too ab­stract). We are fear­ful of The Other.

One of the ironies here is that as a re­sult of this ‘loss of sep­a­ra­tion’ and things being so in­dis­tinct (pos­si­bly be­cause of it) we are prob­a­bly fur­ther away from each other emo­tion­ally and phys­i­cally, even when we eat.

The French are con­tin­u­ing to be an ex­cep­tion to this trend but re­search has shown that more than one in five [British] fam­i­lies “only sit down to eat a meal to­gether once or twice a week. 40% of them only sit down to­gether to have a meal three times a week.” The av­er­age Amer­i­can eats one in every five meals in a car!

All this has made me tired now. I sus­pect you are too.