I only recently found out that Pokemon Go exists because my bubble of not giving a shit hadn’t yet been popped by the needle of inevitable social interaction.
I had it explained to me that one of the great excitements about Pokemon Go is that it is getting kids outside and moving around. Furthermore, parents are walking with their kids and driving them from place to place to support this supposed non-screen time where vitamin D is produced by natural means rather than by ingesting dairy products like a good American consumer and unwittingly absorbing wayward residual solar rays reflecting off their computer screens. Seriously. Adults see this as health and socialization progress, and sadly, they may be right.
If this is the current standard of “getting kids outside to play” that we hold, I think we can, first, officially toss the towel in on fighting the obesity epidemic, and second, consign ourselves to the fact that the actual world has finally lost the war against the infinite number of false paradises we have been trying to live in as much as possible online.
One would think that the internet would have opened humanity’s eyes to a wealth of facts and truths that would advance the human condition by sheer force of undeniability. Instead, it has shrunk our individual existences to the point that we are all living inside of carefully crafted worlds over which we reign as gods and goddesses. If we don’t want to deal with something, we blot it out. If a friend says something provoking thoughts we don’t want to hear, we block them. Any media content we don’t want to be exposed to is simply passed over or deleted. Politics? Holy shit…nobody even cares what the truth is as long the election ends with us feeling like winners. Toss in the fact that advertising has evolved to the point that I can look at a single naked titty and ten seconds later the entirety of the internet is trying to get me to cheat on my wife, and it’s no surprise nobody cares about going to the moon:
When we can eliminate all facts and dissonant information, the “truth” is literally whatever we want it to be.
So grab your phone and start staking your claim to churches that are Pokemon gyms and parking lots that are…fuck…whatever else was explained to me that was so inane I lied to an oncologist about having brain cancer to get radiated out of my skull. Eventually we will all become the cultural equivalent of the Sloth victim laying in bed decaying from the movie Seven, and expect to see a lot of people from other countries dunking over us on the basketball court and generally taking over the Pale Blue Dot that, according to a lot of people living here, is actually half red, half white, and has a little button in the middle
Not that I expect we’ll notice.