In the mail: “I have had enough of and am exhausted by and tired of the division, confusion, conflicts, and disarray of the world over the now 77 years of my life so I want and desire simple peace and quiet. I want to create and live in my own private world and surroundings devoid of what I’ve had to endure AND I am NOT unique by any stretch. So, my world consists of a very small nest of people and animals based on my own heart, not the decisions, ideas of others. This is very common, the desire for personally designed peaceful solitude.”
Don’t you often feel the same? (Try a Blessed Sacrament chapel.)
It’s gotten to be too much, the extremes, the constant tech-more-tech frenzy, the endless diatribes from all sides. This week Oxford Dictionary named the term “brain rot” as phrase of the year, defining it as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
Everyone has a podcast. Everyone has a big boom microphone (and cool headphones).
The phrase “quart-d’heure de célébrité” (fifteen minutes of fame) was used in France during the 19th century, notably by Alphonse Daudet in an article first published in 1879. It means, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” True prophecy.
Artist Andy Warhol made the words famous in 1968 in a program for one of his bizarre art exhibits. It’s only gotten quicker and more bizarre and scrofulous since.
Do you often find yourself in a frenzy by all the YouTube or TikTok or Instagram videos, or what’s flitting about on Facebook and what once was Twitter (now we have to call things–to shorten attention spans still shorter–“X”)?
It would be a mere amusing aside if the “viral” nature of the new (countless) media didn’t have the downside of vertigo and misinformation.
We listen now to what we want to hear. Facts are what we choose them to be. We all belong to one tribe or cult or another.
When it comes to health, this can have repercussions. (“Beef tallow is now good for you.” “No it’s not,” bark others. Eggs are good. Not. No more moderation.)
Little balance these days. Besides fast and short–snap–everything must be loud and, whenever possible, confrontational.
Prayer is the only answer.
There’s a new celebrity every nano-second. There is busy-ness everywhere you turn. There is someone with yet more billions than the next multi-billionaire.
“Everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
A truism, indeed.
But how about this famous saying (actually the title to an old movie):
“Stop the World, I Want To Get Off.”
The earth rotates at a thousand miles an hour. Often it feels like more than that.
With all that swirls, with all that shouts, with all that blurs, with phones everywhere, with flashing ads, with torrents of streamed videos, vortices of entertainment and infotainment (with politics now in everything), the only peace we find is in the Arms of Jesus, Who, without a cell phone, and with no ego, remains the most famous of all.
