Another week has passed and here we are at the gate of 12:12, which is also my birthday. There won't be an update for a few days next week, because I'm traveling home to Hungary and spending a few days there with my family.
Since I don't travel "home" often, there is always something new to see or change in the city. Unfortunately, what remains unchanged are the traffic jams at peak hours and the large number of people shopping. As it is the Advent season, the small Christmas markets are open and in the evenings the town square is lit up with Christmas lights, the town's Christmas tree is decorated, and every year the Nativity scene is also made.
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This week's theme is "everything was better in the old days" and "quality versus quantity".
Many of us heard from our parents and grandparents the phrase that everything was better in the old days. I do agree on a few things when I look back on my childhood, but it is worth mentioning that time tends to make things more beautiful.
As children of the 80s and 90s, we had a childhood because we were not prisoners of technology and social media. At that time, we children played and talked outside a lot under the blue unstriped sky, sometimes we were outside until the evening, until our mother shouted that "it's time to come in - dinner". In the winter, we visited each other, or went sledding when there was a lot of snow.
We even made handwritten or typewritten letters and birthday party invitations to each other, and the "memory book" was a big trend at school. We made friends in real life, and whatever crazy things we did, there was no digital footprint of it.
On weekends, we went to the videocassette rental store and borrowed a movie or a cartoon that we watched together with the family.
Our former primary school was the first to buy computers and teach basic IT. At that time, the browser was still the Netscape navigator and there were not many sites that we could visit, especially not in Hungarian. The floppy disk was considered cool at the time and so was the videocassette. Accessing the Internet on the home computer was a very lengthy procedure - dial-up - downloading a few Mbits was a matter of hours - if the connection was not interrupted.
We got our first mobile phone in middle school, it was about the size and weight of half a brick compared to the ones we have now. We could only call, text or play with it.
At that time, CDs and CD players became more widely available (not in horror price) computers, games and Internet access (the first Hungarian social media) became widespread, and technology began to ensnare us more and more and today we almost live on the internet and technologies.
We already put a mobile phone in the hands of a small child, they brought up on TV and YouTube, we publish a million pictures of them to acquaintances and strangers at the same time and we share almost everything with the public.
Most people would not be able to exist without their mobile phone, they eat, bathe, wc, sleep, drive, etc. with it. There is no more depressing sight than when we go to a restaurant or on vacation and families, friends and couples spend time together staring at their phones. They are sitting there in each other's company and fiddling with their phones between some small conversation. In fact, we are viewing reality through a screen that may not even be real.
We have become a consumer society. We consume everything, be it food, drink, friendship, love.
We were taught to take care of our things, especially if you grew up in a poor family. But those things were somehow durable. At that time, quality was more important than quantity. Today, this situation has changed a lot. E.g. our old boiler, which is 30+ years old and still worked till today. But we can talk about old mobile phones, washing machines, PCs, etc.
These new technologies kind of break down after a few years because they are mass produced just to make a profit and the massive advertising encourages you to buy newer and newer versions, often even if you don't want to, as the company simply cuts off support for the old product. And as this new quantitative age has become, humanity is beginning to become one as well. Something broken - we replace it, something outdated - we buy a new one. and unfortunately this mentality crept into our relationships as well. Broken relationship, family or friendship - let's break up, why would we put in the work to make it work, it was toxic anyway (the new trend), we will get new anyway.
Let's consume, buy, everything, because it makes us "happy". The reality is, no, you won't really be satisfied with it - just for a while. As long as we hide from ourselves and don´t work on ourselves and our relationships, we can chase or buy happiness for minutes, then we will not be truly happy and we will not be free.
