I don’t need your feelings anymore. So, I said. I really have my pockets full of it. Stop playing me, stop making claims to the truth because of your instincts kicking in, stop shouting.
Every day, every moment, I am inundated with everything that makes you bubble, steam, rage and howl. You are on my television, on my computer, on my radio, in my newspaper, on my phone.
You are talking to me, out of breath with dismay, stamping your feet, rebelling, crying, hear me, hear me. No one, really no one, is holding back any more. When something hurts, your soul or your knee, you want me to know it. And not just know, but sympathize with you. Or feel against you, as long as there is feeling, in the heart and stomach and in that part of the brain where there is no ‘afterthought’.
Just as breakdancers with wide arms, circling, ask for space for their act, you ask attention for your new skin, you have peeled off the old one, look there, it is in a corner, look, look at it, it makes you cry again . A lonely darkness is imposed on me, after which, of course, there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel, because the stories you share rarely rise above platitudes. And that’s because you all want the rest of you to love-love-love. That’s why you color within the lines heroes journeys full of attempts to pull my tears from me. From valley to peak and back and forth again. Of bad and good. Of devils and angels.
And if you don’t know what to feel, you force a pounding heart. Then you write something pathetic, or something controversial, something to draw anger and appreciation. If anything comes, anything, send it, send it. Receive. Feel.
Your despair at the state of the world, your desperate calls to action: to march together with tears in your eyes a long day’s journey towards salvation. Don’t you dare withdraw. Look how bad, thump your chest and scream.
Sometimes you are very quiet for a moment and tears flow from your closed eyes. Your hands are folded, you breathe deeply in and out, you are incredibly present.
Sometimes you are cynical, but it is the cynicism of hurt teenagers, it is cynicism that says: look at my cold heart. See it and warm me up.
Our relationship with each other and the world is disturbed, if just before the end of a relationship, when there is only shouting and crying at each other, people only want to highlight their own pain and disappointment, and no one finishes a sentence. , no one says anything nuanced, and the loved ones rush towards the total escalation without a second thought.
Twenty years from now, when our children have to deal with the consequences of a childhood with parents who were consumed by their screens, we will probably pick up the pieces. But then we are too late.
So maybe we can be a little more reserved? Are you less likely to be convinced of our expressiveness? Less fishing for love, less saying ‘heartbreaking’? Remove ourselves from our opinions more often? Deeply distrust our emotions? Stop confusing empathy with hysteria?
My screen time is six hours a day. I’m just as addicted as all of you.
Should we kick the habit?
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