Normal Life For Most People Is Like An Episode of Black Mirror

Wake Up at 7. Take a shower, eat in a rush and head for the car where you are going to be stuck in traffic for 1 hour. Arrive at work. Stare at a screen and take shit from people you don't like for 8 hours. Get stuck in traffic again. Arrive at home exhausted. Watch other miserable people like you in social media share their ideal self. Everyone goes to bed even more miserable. Rinse, repeat.

Black Mirror is a television show that shows how technology might affect our lives in the future. The themes of each episode are dark since people most often get trapped in their lives by technological creations. At the end of each episode, there is a sense of "holy shit" going through the brain.

If people from the early 1900's or even 1950's could see their future then our lives would be a perfect candidate for Black Mirror. Science and technology have transformed us in such ways that the human factor is becoming more and more irrelevant. We are all set of data in a massive cloud. Our identities are not ours but rather become the reflection of the projections of those around us. This has created a digital culture of codependency and false narratives that itself reinforces a sense of pointlessness and misery.

An average human being today owns a phone, a tv and a computer. We stare at screens almost on a constant rate. What is important in our lives passes through those tiny pixels. What makes us human is the direct input from those screens and not our face-to-face interaction. This is apparent when we meet someone in person that we previously chatted online. The experience is surreal. There is almost no direct link between the two, yet, our mental processes, cannot properly distinguish between the two. This is Black Mirror 101.

We treat people different that exist on screens. In much the same way we get angry people while we are driving. Similarly, we fool ourselves that it is the norm to take a car to work and waste 2 hours, work for another 8 hours and follow a path of college, job, family, career death. We are falling in line because the path is laid out before us. Technology doesn't seem to liberate most people. It seems to enslave them.

Today, more than ever, each of us has the tools and capacity to escape from what we call "the system". Information is power and never before we had direct and free access to so much information. At the same time, there are plenty of traps for the ones that like to follow the herd, the compliant, the ones that succumb to trends because they can't take a chance to live for themselves. For those who had the courage to see beyond the Black Mirrors life is entirely different. There is more control, more variation, more experiences, more living.

At the end of the day this is all what it comes down to. Living. Black Mirror portrays a series of events where people are caught up in loops of their own devices, literally. It is the easy, convenient way to get a temporary satisfaction, a release. Life though goes on. Experiences pile up. When our lives become the same loops, a repeated sequence, then we are not living for ourselves. We are living it for someone else.