Bored Robots in a Mundane World

It is a common perception that we live in a world driven, shaped, and molded by technology. It looks like technology has made us more automatic, that it is interfering with and influencing not only the way we live, but also the way we think, feel, and behave; in short, technology is changing our perception of and interaction with ourselves and the world.

All you need is to watch people in the modern industrialized world. They are constantly and consistently connected to the Internet with their various shapes of devices ranging from phones to tablets to pads. 

Books are becoming obsolete as new hordes and generations of e-readers are replacing them. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 needs to be re-written and updated with the temperature at which chips burn (in a microwave perhaps?).

But I am going to claim that it is – as almost always in life – a two-way street. It is not only that technology is affecting us but that we ourselves have brought technology into the foreground. 

We can look at this development of modern technology historically by tracing it back to the first machines: steam engines, mechanical ways of farming and defiant chess-playing computers.

The brilliant mathematician Alan Turing saw the many possibilities of the computer and foresaw its next step / model (which we are currently in the process of refining), namely Artificial Intelligence. 

Whether a machine can think is the question he poses; in the meantime, we are trying to create rudimentary forms and versions of thought-machines bound and circumvented by our current standards of knowledge and know-how.

But interestingly, before we look at electronic and automatic versions of human beings in the near or distant future, let us consider how mechanical we ourselves have become over time. In fact, I claim that it is us who have become robots even before the advent and modern advances of technology.

Our lives have become more and more mechanical. Evidently, I do not have the experience and first-hand knowledge of how life used to be in the past nor I am not here to glamorize the “good old days” (I am not old enough for that). But within my limited experience, I can see a growing trend in the direction of more mechanical ways of thinking and living, and I find this both disheartening and frightening.

I am living through interesting time periods of transitions and changes. I have experienced life without computers where television used to rule our daily life. Even until less than a decade ago, I was still able to walk and commute without any access to the Internet via smartphones, but I finally succumbed to the pressure and alluring enchantments of technology.

I lived in a time period where we still used record players (although I never owned one) and cassette and video tapes, which I owned massively and in bulks. Then CDs appeared, and I vividly remember the excitement of putting in the first CD in a newly purchased CD player. Nobody had cellphones back then but some lucky and distinguished few would proudly brandish a beeper, a completely useless device by modern standards.

But I do not regret any of those previous experiences. I still think that technology has given us a lot of conveniences, don’t get me wrong, but I am glad that I also happened to live in a time where we were deprived of technology or where it at least did not rule over all the aspects of our lives.

As a teenager I used to have a typewriter, which embodied a very cumbersome - not to say pain in the ass – writing process, and it made it much more challenging to produce, store, and distribute my own writing in the era before word processors and blogs.

Moreover, I remember once my bus broke down, and I was not able to contact my date (it was a first date too!) and that the relationship never recovered from this unfortunate and unexpected mishap. Today I would have merely sent a text message with an emoji and would have been able to smooth the whole situation (or so I think).

But we had technology coming and it was merely a matter of time and circumstance. Our life was already becoming mechanical and automatic. 

We started limiting our patterns of thought as well as our imagination and goals and achievements, as a result. As we have reached more comfortable living standards, we have also become lax and lazier in our lives as well as our outlook on the future.

Instead of looking for new and fresh ways of doing things, we often fall back into the tried and tested, the safe and well-trodden path. Instead of coming up with our own answers and philosophies, we are being spoon-fed cookie-cutter answers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the growing self-help industry that gives us half-baked, half-chewed and undigested answers taking away our own capacity to come to the same and even better truths.

Our behavior is also mechanical and regulated. It seems that we have stifled that which makes us different in the fear of not fitting in with society and our peers; consequently, we lose our own individuality. We look the same. We eat and dress the same. We are machines that feed and talk; we do not seem to be in control of our own minds.

Our cities and living environments follow that same pattern. We have malls that are filled with identical stores. When in the past, we had a certain amount of choice, now we all go to the same coffee shop. We even talk and think alike in many cases and become easily replaceable in jobs and relationships. Put differently, we are robots or robotic versions of ourselves.

Since our relationships with ourselves are fragmented and lack direction and imagination, it is only natural that our interactions and relationships with others are not going to be genuine or fulfilling or even worth its salt. We have come to identify ourselves with the mechanical faces we have put on and are confused about our true selves.

It pretty much comes down to the fact that we are afraid of feelings. Many of us see them as a hindrance, a limitation, and even label it as a weakness. We control our emotions with the iron fists of logic. We try to look for the best out there in terms of jobs, living space, and mates.

Yet our standards of quality are often driven by convenience and materialistic considerations. The “best” job turns out to be the one with the greatest economic benefits. The “best” mate is the one with the strongest appeal in terms of looks and appearance or even again in terms of economic prosperity.

We prefer a physically attractive person so that we can supposedly enhance our own looks and overcome the shortcomings we see in ourselves. We might look for the educated partner not because of stimulating and deep and profound conversations but because we may believe that they represent entry to higher-level and better-paying jobs or to more prestige and acknowledgment in society.

And all of this leads to boredom. We become bored with our lives. We become bored with our jobs, which we did not want or desire in the first place; bored with our partners because we did not listen to our feelings and were led astray by practical considerations. We reach the glass-ceiling goals we have set ourselves and see no room for improvement or further success.

In other words, we are the bored robots. And the life we have created is one of fantasy. It is make-believe but in its negative delusional form; the world loses its vivacious colors and turns into a dull mundane black-and-white world. 

Nothing satisfies or makes us happy in any lasting and fundamental way. We look to fill the void and turn to sex, drugs, money, possessions, fame, and might even expect and hope religion to fill those gaps within ourselves.

But more often than not this is not the solution. In those cases, we are trying very hard to escape from ourselves without actually knowing who we are. So we see it as temporary relief from the accustomed world of boredom until we wake up to the same monotonous music of our dreaded every-day life or at least our thinking makes it seem so.

So what can we do then to reach a more fulfilled and fulfilling life? The first step would be to get in touch with oneself. The best manner to do so is to establish contact again with our feelings and to really listen to ourselves. 

It is important to lose the fear of others and of failure, this impending gloom and doom that we carry around with us non-stop and that constantly pushes us down.

It is time we regain our humanity, and we engage in those activities that define us, while we manage to put aside the technological devices, at least, once in a while. We need to be free, of technology, of the opinion of others, and of our limiting and often self-defeating views, and we need to truly look at ourselves and at the world we live in and realize that we are neither bored nor robots nor do we live in a dull and mundane world.