CAVE VITAE VORAGINEM! BEWARE OF LIFE’S WHIRLPOOL!

Today, we live in an incredibly fast-paced world. One minute, some news grabs our attention, it is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, it is the trending topic; the next, this news is old news, everyone has moved on to something else entirely.

We were preoccupied with that celebrity yesterday. Today we cannot even remember their name. That piece of fashion was all the rage yesterday. Today, it is cause for embarrassment. That song was a subconscious, constant hum in our heads just yesterday, lyrics and all. Today, we can recall neither its title nor the artist’s name.

Everything seems so fast, there is just so much that is claiming our attention all the time. We are gripped by a sense of ineluctable speed: blink, and you will be left behind. “πάντα ῥεῖ”, said Heraclitus, everything flows, nothing remains the same for long.

There seems to be an obligation on everyone to stay up to date by all means necessary: who wants to be left behind, to be left out of conversations on trending topics?

Neil Postman opined that this is a fundamental characteristic of the television and smartphone culture. To be able to hold our attention, this culture flourishes on newsflashes, loud, garish advertisement, and reels. A hodgepodge of colour, cacophonous “music”, and infantile reading offerings, aka memes.

There is danger in this. And it is interesting that the people who most penetratingly warned about it are from 2000 years ago, when television and the smartphone were not even figments of the imagination yet. It demonstrates that times change, but human nature at bottom remains almost the same.

Seneca the Younger, the Roman Stoic, wrote in his second moral letter to Lucilius, “primum argumentum compositae mentis existimo posse consistere et secum morari”: I consider this the chief characteristic of a healthy mind, to be able to stop and linger with oneself. And again, “nusquam est qui ubique est”: that person is nowhere, who is everywhere.

The English say “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, the Chewa “mwala ogudubuzika suyanga ndele”. Constant movement can be exciting, but allows no anchor. And without anchor, you will, of necessity, be pushed in the direction the wind blows in. And you will have lost agency, the sense of control over your own life.

Today, reclaim your life. Learn to stop. Summon the courage to switch off the tv and the phone. Find time to disregard the constant demands of school, work, and relationships. Steal a moment for yourself. Close your eyes. “Linger with yourself”.    

MR. C. MEDSON

Teacher of Classics