Perhaps, just perhaps, we could try to be interesting.
Before we all become entirely predictable.
Before the landscape – already flattened by consensus – becomes a featureless plain.
Before the narratives, once jagged, smooth themselves straight into a screen.
We drift. The curated feed; the algorithmically suggested life, the pre-packaged outrage. We’ve traded uncertainty for the expected. We know what the next headline will scream; what the next opinion will parrot. Rhetoric, once a tool for probing, has become a well-trodden script.
I remember – or maybe I only imagine I remember – a time when the air crackled with the possibility of something unexpected. When silences weren’t filled with scrolling, but with the weight of unspoken things. Didn’t we once live in the shadow of the unformed? Now, we’re entombed in the brightly lit mausoleum of The Known.
We gather.
We pronounce.
We categorise.
We reduce experience to hashtags and emotion to emojis (or if you’re a middle aged man, gifs). We build identities or shared grievances, shared affirmations. We’re in an echo chamber and it has become literal architecture around us. We wander its halls, comforted by our own voices, amplified.
The impulse to shock has become rather a predictable performance. The transgressive has been commodified, packaged and sold back to us:
We crave rebellion – but only within established parameters.
We want to be different – but not too different.
We want to be interesting- but not too interesting.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we could try to be interesting. Not in the performative way, but in the quiet, subversive way. To cultivate the interior landscape; to nurture the strange, the idiosyncratic, the unremarkable. To resist conformity; to reject categorisation – to embrace discomfort.
I want us all to look – really look – at the world, not through filtered biases, but with a clear gaze. And I want us to listen – to really listen – to the voices that challenge us; not to refute, but to understand.
Before the last flicker of curiosity dies, before the last vestige of individual thought is extinguished, before the landscape of our collective consciousness becomes utterly predictable. Perhaps, just perhaps, we could trade some of whatever this is, for a moment of actual interest.