Facebook and The Sixth Sense.

All the information we need is available. Loneliness is laziness when you are on Facebook. Everyone is trying to be creative, smart and beautiful. Falling in love is easy and being single is fine. Having fun is much more fun than in the past. Staying fit and healthy is our responsibility. Shopping is a therapy. Choice makes you free. Freedom is your right.

I have a feeling that we simply can’t realize, what is happening to all of us, as long as the majority is pursuing continuous consumption. There is a new stratification of our society based on one’s prevalent relationship to information, which is either processing it or creating. The distinction is often blurred, but these two groups are there, and the latter one is considerably smaller. What’s wrong with reaping intellectual harvest of others? Well, that is often explained by insatiability and attention dispersion. The very structure of one’s brain is changing in response to exuberance of information. It’s getting more difficult to go deeper, to stop and ponder over an issue. The temptation of novelty makes us plunge headlong into continuous wandering without any destination.

With dozens of blogs we follow, hundreds of friends we communicate with, thousands of posts we like and opinions we share, it’s getting harder and harder to maintain real relationships the way we used to.

When the night falls, and I’m alone in my room, Facebook and Skype are my only company. Instead of sending an email to my family, I tend to exchange short messages with them, usually using Latin script keyboard for Russian language messages. I am often amazed at the ability of a recipient to perceive my moods however primitive my messages are. That doesn’t happen with anyone I talk to, but almost always with the closest and most sensitive people. This observation led me to an assumption that online communication stimulates the development of The Sixth Sense in some individuals.

I have also noticed that I didn’t enjoy online chatting with certain people to the same degree as I did when having real communication with them. In other words, those whom I really liked spending my time with were often those whom I talked online the least. When my mum was wondering why I didn’t write to her, I couldn’t explain, although some part of me knew the reason. How could I describe to her the all-embracing feeling I had while just being together, resorting to words as mere catalysts for the energy sharing.

I believe that we are only in the beginning of the time of a significant mind alteration that has started with proliferation of social media. Being all the time connected to people strains one’s intuition and stretches imagination. When you make a post on Facebook wall, you can often foretell your friends’ reaction. Constantly analyzing activity of hundreds of people stimulates the senses we still don’t know much about. And we can only guess about the nature of such changes. I believe that we will be more sensitive, seeking real deep relationships and lasting romances.

Internet is becoming so integrated into the reality, that anonymity is hardly possible. If all of us just give in and start sharing, life will become even more wonderful! And more miracles are still to come.

Racing is relaxing.

I spent last weekend at the Hockenheimring in Germany. Racing is in fact an excellent relaxation therapy for intelligent minds. It requires the highest degree of mental concentration and demands direction of all your attention to the track lane. A minor mistake might cost one a life.

When the values of the society you live in don’t match with yours, the inner conflict begins. Sometimes I find myself thinking over the same problem for hours, often unconsciously, while sleeping. Taking my mind off the disturbing issue seems almost impossible, and I go deeper and deeper into the state of helpless worrying. Agitation is becoming a norm in our society, and being calm is regarded as a deficiency by many of us.

When you are on a racetrack, everything becomes simple and clear. Roaring engines don’t let you talk nonsense, everyone is involved in achieving a common goal, and however strained the environment might be, people become more humane. In two short days I have had some “amazingly real” conversations that make me see new horizons and believe in who I am.