aaaaaaaaaaand we're back.

I'm sure we're probably not. But we ("we") have reached yet another breaking point in this finite yet far too long series of breaking points. What do we call a series of points again, a line? If a line is one-dimensional and has no depth, sounds about right. I guess a curve is also a line, but this is kind of my point: what is wrong with us? Why can we barely express a complete thought. "We". 

I don't even just mean "we" anymore, I think I mean the actual we, as in all of us. Certainly one problem can be called something like patiencelessness when it comes to finding solutions for things, very much like the patience I just ran out of while considering how to start talking about this. To myself. 

Let's start over with a couple of basic modern challenges that, when combined, can very easily create the illusion of an impenetrable, oceanic wall of doom, at least for this writer. Off of what passes for the top of my head these days: 

1) Dopamine, the "firehose of pleasure" that being online offers us, the constant buzz of harmless, idle consumption...addictive enough to impair us from being creative our own selves in any meaningful offline way, more on that in a bit.

1b) The satisfaction of knowing anything immediately. This is a subcategory of dopamine addiction that makes us unprecedentedly susceptible to new problems like reasonably realistic misinformation, see below.

2) The lowered bar to content creation means that "anyone" can create "compelling" content, instead of having to learn a skill that doesn't involve a phone and an app and some kind of AI...just download a free app that does everything for you. One result of which is that our content keeps getting more homogenous, because everyone is using the same or very similar tools; and said content is generally less complex and "more stupider," because that's the whole concept of these tools...requiring as little skill or intelligence as possible, the less the better.

2b) I think that unless your profession or serious creative outlet involves expressing complex thoughts to an audience of listeners or readers on an extremely regular basis, your ability to express yourself is probably undergoing some kind of atrophy, because all you do is consume other people's gradually stupider content.

3) The fact that getting offline is still a minority position at this point, and probably seems like a comparably "lonely" undertaking, although there's considerable evidence that our being online all the time is not making us less lonely at all. Point being, "how can anyone survive offline!?!?!??!"

4) The disillusionment of discovering that people are generally not as good or as smart as we once somehow thought they were, a position we originally arrived at through a simple lack of evidence to the contrary, combined wish wishful thinking/optimism. Now there is plennnnnty of evidence and no legitimate reason for optimism.

5) The plague of misinformation. This is probably going to be the end of us, because: we're addicted to being online; it's making us stupider; the stupider we are, the more susceptible we are to misinformation. And the more evil among us are going to use this to get ahead of the less evil among us, because it's easy.  Combine this with our increasingly insatiable need to have the answer to any possible question at our fingertips and well buddy you've got yrself a veritable powderkeg of something. Sorry, still shaking off the atrophy. 

OK! Call this a work in progress hopefully. 
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