There was a time
when a seductive, blood-red
Facebook notification
would trigger in me
waves of dopamine
which flooded my bloodstream
like amiodarone, lidocaine
and a handful other
difficult-to-spell drugs
which i hope
you never learn to spell,
as they enter my papa
through an IV cannula
while he lies sedated
amidst beeping, blinking screens
and a flock of apathetic doctors
desensitized by
too much disease
too less equipment
and too often death.
For too long
I have been addicted
to that dopamine
while aching for interactions
meaningful enough
for a homosapien
to carry on
the futility, monotony
called modern life.
But now I ask
if that really is “enough”.
If, in my ten days of inactivity,
43 notifications
of a virtual book club’s activities,
of the memes I have been tagged in
made by sullen,
self loathing, suicidal teens
that are ironically intent
on making their viewers laugh,
of unreferenced, unverifiable anecdotes
no better than oldwives tales,
of pandemic-related quackery
both religious and secular,
of birthdays of people
I haven’t seen in years,
of friend requests by
people I don’t recognize,
really mean anything.
It’s silly how important
we think we are,
when we are nothing
more than
43 notifications.
43 Notifications
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Comments
3 responses to “43 Notifications”
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Ouch. So true. “How important we think we are” reminds me of a passage from “The Mysterious Universe”. It says, “Into such a universe we have stumbled, if not exactly
by mistake, at least as the result of what may properly be
described as an accident. The use of such a word need not
imply any surprise that our earth exists, for accidents will
happen, and if the universe goes on for long enough, every
conceivable accident is likely to happen in time. It was, I
think, Huxley who said that six monkeys, set to strum
unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of
years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the
British Museum. If we examined the last page which a
particular monkey had typed, and found that it had
chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a re-
markable accident, but if we looked through all the millions
of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of
years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet
somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of
chance. In the same way, millions of millions of stars
wandering blindly through space for millions of millions of
years are bound to meet with every kind of accident; a
limited number are bound to meet with that special kind
of accident which calls planetary systems into being. Yet
calculation shews that the number of these can at most be
very small in comparison with the total number of stars in
the sky; planetary systems must be exceedingly rare obj ects
in space.
This rarity of planetary systems is important, because so
far as we can see, life of the kind we know on earth could
only originate on planets like the earth. It needs suitable
physical conditions for its appearance, the most important
of which is a temperature at which substances can exist in
the liquid state.
The stars themselves are disqualified by being far too hot.
We may think of them as a vast collection of fires scattered
throughout space, providing warmth in a climate which is
at most some four degrees above absolute zero—about 484
degrees of frost on our Fahrenheit scale—and is even lower
in the vast stretches of space which lie out beyond the
Milky Way. Away from the fires there is this unimaginable
cold of hundreds of degrees of frost; close up to them there
is a temperature of thousands of degrees, at which all solids
melt, all liquids boil.
Life can only exist inside a narrow temperate zone which
surrounds each of these fires at a very definite distance. Outside these zones life would be frozen; inside, it would be
shrivelled up. At a rough computation, these zones within
which life is possible, all added together, constitute less than
a thousand million millionth part of the whole of space.
And even inside them, life must be of very rare occurrence,
for it is so unusual an accident for suns to throw off planets
as our own sun has done, that probably only about one star
in 100,000 has a planet revolving round it in the small zone
in which life is possible.
Just for this reason it seems incredible that the universe
can have been designed primarily to produce life like our
own; had it been so, surely we might have expected to find
a better proportion between the magnitude of the mechan-
ism and the amount of the product. At first glance at least,
life seems to be an utterly unimportant by-product; we
living things are somehow off the main line.” -
“[Had the universe been designed to produce life like our own, there should have been] a better proportion between the magnitude of the mechanism and the amount of the product.”
If one is a believer in God and his attribute of “Al-Lateef” which roughly translates to “master of minutest details”, I think a thousand million millionth proportion in his creation should not baffle us. Life is meaningful to me in its own right but in this poem, I mean to point out that the interactions we engage in are too artificial and perhaps even worthless. -
I can relate to this. With age I have realised there is so little I can survive on. Most of our engagements are simply constructs we erect to escape from the fear of loneliness, boredom, or just feeling unwanted or unappreciated. We are scared of waking up one day and being ignored by everyone around us. And I don’t even think that this is a conscious fear. We feel all these things keep us relevant. But the truth of the matter is, being relevant is overrated.
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