It's all changing.
"“Yes. I also told him where the deviations would occur. Obviously the fitness of the animals to the environment was one area. This stegosaur is a hundred million years old. It isn't adapted to our world. The air is different, the solar radiation is different, the land is different, the insects are different, the sounds are different, the vegetation is different. Everything is different. The oxygen content is decreased. This poor animal's like a human being at ten thousand feet altitude. Listen to him wheezing.”
That quote from the novel Jurassic Park always stood out to me. While the quote is a minor reference within the novel, it really brings to the forefront all the variables that compose an environment. Sounds, insects, air density, solar radiation and a million other unforeseen or unconsidered factors combine to make one's environment. After reading that note I paused and considered a resurrected Stegosaurus roaming a faux Jurassic-era in which nothing seemed right.
My world has also changed drastically and I now find myself aware of all the environmental facets that were once so indefinable but now immediately evident. The populated shopping mall, common language, unified culture and morality, family and meaning how all adjusted out of sync with the world I once knew. The most notable change is undoubtedly the people. Of all things the people. I've never had such difficulty connecting to people in close proximity yet so distant in thought and experience. Thought has been replaced with reaction - reaction derived from thousands of hours of television, social media and mobile phones. People laugh not because the joke was funny but rather because the rhythmic behavior of the scene matches the rhythms played out without a thousand other scenes laid before them. Our lives have become the aftermath of the sitcom. They shout their experiences at you without taking much thought, action, or consideration of your experiences or even what they are shouting. So absorbed in their own emotion, story and narrative that it is near impossible to derail their thought or get a word in edgewise. I often take a deep breath and pause while I let the individual across the table vomit out whatever experience his electronically-zombified mind is fixated upon. On the one hand I envy the level of concentration it takes to stand adjacent to your wife and not notice that the two of you are eagerly shouting the same story to bystanders apart from a 10-second delay yet on the other hand I'm taken aback by how once can so oblivious to one's surroundings.
I, like the stegosaurus, find myself in a faux environment where the world has derailed from what I once knew. So many facets bring about this indescribable change, but the prime catalyst is electronic media. Netflix, television, internet, social media and above all mobile phones have managed to alter the people, experiences and social interactions I once knew. No longer are human actions something novel or engaging, but instead they are passive reenactments of consumed media. One participate starts with peculiar phrase, while the second jumps in with a corresponding movie quote. Immediately, as if spurred by Pavlov’s bell, the whole group begins to recite the movie quote. The group is spurred by urge, not by reason or thought but pure impulse brought upon by countless hours of repetitive electronic hypnosis.
Humanity prior to mobile devices is very much different that humanity after mobile devices and I generally feel sorrow for anyone who hasn't experienced life before mobile electronics. Mobile devices draw the person down to trance like reactionary state where the mind becomes a passive observer to the impulses of the body. I once foolishly thought the notion of dopamine hits brought on the mobile devices was garbage, but witnessing entire swaths of people turn to mobile devices during every break in conversation has convinced of the dangers of these dopamine hits.
Like the Stegosaur, I find myself adrift in this faux world that is but a shadow of time before electronic devices.