One of these decisive factors for the current young is video games. You've heard of it, so it must be true. Capitalist America has groomed their electronic cow to produce the most milk out of the young, forcing them to convene on common grounds of "fun".
So it's a whole other argument when it come to video games that concerns me. Are teens playing games because they want to? Or because they're forced to?
'Forced' is a bit misleading here, but I'm referring to societal peer pressure. The internal instinct of capitalist America has triggered a subconscious desire to purchase. Not because the product is practical, but because it's the 'best' thing to do. There is a fine line between buying a game because you want to play it, and just because someone else has it.
This ties into the American education system, which, through no fault of its own, has encouraged kids to compete with each other. First it was grades, then it was material possessions, and now it's social lives. The system has played on our primal need to compete, turning it all into a covert war of buying and owning.
It's an addiction to compete. It's deadly in America, where whoever has the most, wins. Now that it's taken hold in the electronic world, kids are being exposed to the perils at infancy. It's a drug.
You hear stories and cases of people falling into internet and video game addiction, but you dissociate from them because you believe you believe their cases are extreme and unfathomable to you. But what if it's because you're just denying it from yourself? If it could happen to them, it could happen to you, right?
What I'm ultimately getting at here is that addictions cause you to lose personal integrity. This is virtual cocaine, which affects the mind and the body. The more you're connected to electronics, the harder it is to step away. You might think that this is obvious, but many people continue to set their measures of e-addiction higher and higher.
Who can blame them? In this modern America, it's no longer practical to be disconnected. Peoples' jobs are spent in front of a computer. Teenagers have to use a computer to do their assignments. More and more, it seems that our society is becoming more enslaved to machines rather than the other way around.
It may turn out in the long run that resisting electronic cocaine is a futile endeavor. After all, society is measured in change by infinite unpredictable factors that become increasingly unrecognizable as time passes.
I refuse to believe that we very few can change the flow of history. Yielding to society is much easier than resisting it, because everyday the fight for the little guy becomes harder. It forces us to do the next hardest thing: change ourselves.
Next time you come upon the choice between electronics and a walk in the park, decide what part of you holds more brevity. Are you willing to yield to society, or are you willing to change yourself?
These are the questions I continue to ask myself. The more I grow up in this electronic world, the more I realize the futility of resistance. My search for something more becomes increasingly futile in a society I refuse to accept. The vices of humanity call, and we must all submit.
Am I supposed to feel this way? Is it the new societal standard to feel pessimism? Or am I just growing up?
However:
Just because I take electronic cocaine doesn't mean I have to like it.
And so we merry few continue to fight the 'good' fight. We search for the truth. More importantly, we search for ourselves.
