The Objects of Worship Epidemic

My Thoughts on Culture & Society

As a young man, I was forever chasing beautiful girls, speeding across Europe in exotic fast cars from St. Tropez to the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. Segz, drugs, and rock and roll were always component parts of the experience, but the quest for ever-renewing thrills was engaging.

That is why when it comes to culture and society, there's one thing that has really stood out to me: the absolute fixation on technological objects of worship.

Younger generations, in particular, are overly consumed by their phones and social media, capturing moments digitally instead of experiencing them directly.

From childhood, today's youth spend the majority of their time engaged with their phones rather than with the beauties of nature, their immediate surroundings, or what other people might be doing around them.

Whether at concerts, on hikes, on bikes, at restaurants, or in nightclubs, they seek to capture any moment on their phone to the detriment of the actual experience they should be partaking in. They miss the visceral physical response that comes from actually being present in the moment in whatever they might be doing.

They seem instead consumed by a fear of actually missing out unless they can record their activities with their technological objects of worship, regardless of how trivial or unimportant the actual experience might be.

In my youth, one simply could not live vicariously through screens, as no such devices had been designed, and the intensity of life was such that one could never ever be bored. Not to mention, there were also precious moments of introspection when one was immersed in a good book and left to fantasize on the wings of imagination.

Today, it seems as if people can’t seem to enjoy the moment unless they “immortalize” it by filming or recording each second or Instagramable opportunity. They also proclaim and project their presence at events by posting them on social media, despite social media’s debatable technical, ethical, and moral qualities, just to affirm their existence in some way.

That, it seems, is probably the most fundamental difference between how the majority of people behave and the radically different ways we lived when none of those devices distracted us from enjoying the beauties of nature, the lovely girls we espied, and the direct sensory apprehensions that inspired everything that surrounded us. 

It is a wonder that true sensuality can even exist in such an age.