When you walk, you certainly spend time looking downwards. It is almost a machinery movement that you see. Moving to develop, to maintain, to be. As you look around, you see the same machinery movement all around you. Everyone is following the same steps as you are. Only the pace differs. We are all programmed differently.
Turning your face towards the sky, you might feel like something is pushing the rest of the soul out of you. Like it is willing to do anything it can. To get away. Not to be in the prison of an automatised world we call reality.
-We all feel the urge to get away from this.
It is interesting to revisit our history to see how we have developed a world that is much less human than robotic. – Do we still call this humanism? – How we departed from being are human selves working towards our routines programmed to make and make even more. We keep producing.
We call this innovation. We call this development. This is fantastic; although, we lost track of what we are doing to ourselves. Not to even mention our environment.
An average adult works 8 hours a day 5 times a week. Some work even more on a daily basis. Some even spend the weekend like this. And it is all on repeat. We are forced into this style of living to keep moving forward as our being depends on our monatery state. This is crazy. Not only we spend – more and more of us – working towards making something. We push ourselves to do even more.
Life should not just be about that.
One could argue, once you have made what you could, you can use all amenities produced as ways of entertaining, to re-engage with your lost human self. Is that what life supposed to be?
The Post-Covid experience must have re-embraced everyone to this darkness of our life. To how much we are dependent on amusement that is achieved by production. We all wanted to travel, to go to the cinema, to buy the new collection, to go to the theme park, to have an ice cream in the park. These all connected to the production-based sytle of living we missed so much. Did you really?
A Covid-era allowed us to re-engage with possibilities that differ from production-based life. A walk (even if it means using the shoes, clothes designed, produced, sold and or delivered by someone else), a cycle ride (even if it means being on a bike that was designed, produced, sold and or delivered by someone else) were the activities we could do. We found ourselves facing our human self and had to question. What is it that I can really do with myself?
It is not a surprise that many of us had to dig deep down to understand what is really happening. We have discovered mental health – as an existing subject in our life. (Only some lucky ones manage to get away, but are they actually lucky?). We had to face the truth. We lost our real selves. The human one. But when?
Our Covid activities have shown a possibility to turn focus onto the quality to the action you make. We did not feel we want to have more and more – like how you must feel when finishing your ice cream. We did not feel almost entitled to be spending more and more – like when your children ask you to go for another ride on the fantastic-gigantic-amazing and ‘everythingistic’ game.
How can we capture an era like this? Was Covid-19 a sign for us to stop? Are we going to ignore it and keep going ahead? Well, that is a question for all of us to ask ourselves. Would you want to change?
Sophiesticated Design 