We're lost

We've lost the art of everything

The first thing we ever lost, I am sure, was our attention spans. That was the first time I ever saw a universal call out that something amongst everyone had shifted out of our possession. Lucky for us, everyone now has a way to fix that. It seems it’s been going on so long that it’s like the common cold, something we will somehow get through. Or something we can try to cure. We found a way to cure this lost art of paying attention. But the cure came too late, because along with a waning ability to focus, slowly but surely, everything else went with it. Before we could find our brains again, we lost the art of boredom and, apparently, the capability to read and even write on our own. Then we lost the art of authenticity. We’ve lost the art of everything, I mean, there are giant chunks of people who refuse to socialize and become part of the community they are so adamant they want to benefit from. There are people who are even physically becoming lost. Shrinking before us. We’re lost. As a species in some way.

I agree too that we were lost. There was something about this future that was slipping away from us. A wrong turn that had slightly bigger consequences than we imagined. I am certain we all felt it. Something as simple as downloading TikTok in 2020.

“How bad could this be?!” Bad, apparently. It’s always the stuff in hindsight that gives us 20/20 vision. I see now that we did lose, and began losing much earlier than I thought. It felt terrible to recount everything that used to be, that no longer is. But in some ways, it pointed me, at the very least, in the direction I longed to go.

We have lost so many of the most mundane acts of living. So typical, we never imagined them gone at all. Suddenly, life is empty. We know it’s happening. Every other think piece becomes another thing we have lost to the internet, or billionaires, or celebrities. So much so that I even considered describing our things as stolen, but the act of losing, of participating in the losing, and of being subjected to the losing feels too close too touch-and-go to accurately say it is one or the other. It’s simply lost to me. Lost because someone took it, or lost because we let something take it, or, worst of all, lost because we decided it was easier to lose than it was to hold onto. I was robbed of my attention span, of course, and when I was on social media, I was like anyone else on social media— wasting away. Both physically and metaphorically. I am now tasked with getting it all back. I am walking into the lost and found and taking what is mine. My attention span, my physical media, my life outside of the algorithm. Slowly but surely, I am coming back to life.

We had lost so much that I can’t even make a list; it would be so much easier to just tell you what we hadn’t. We hadn’t lost our self-interest, or so it seems. But was there ever a time when our own experiences were not of some importance to us? I doubt it. In coming back to life myself, I looked for the signs that other people were too. I was not shocked to find that so much of the world was starting to revive the lost art of almost everything. The best part of something lost is something found. I am enjoying seeing the revival of it all. If you take the time, you might see it too.

I see the revival of physical media and a commitment to not relying on a single device to guide us into the future. Which is to say, iPods, physical magazines, books, dumbphones, and calendars seem to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. It’s an easy place to start. It rebuilds the muscles we lost. These things that rob us of convenience in the best way possible. I never went digital when it came to a calendar, but I most certainly started finding what was mine when I got an iPod. I listen to full CDs now. I even collect DVDs. All of this prevented me from looking at my phone and seeing notifications, texts, and whatever else I was doing. I deleted apps that didn’t serve me. Goodbye to Twitter! I am even on the cusp of receiving the newspaper. This is a long-term goal of sorting out a budget that forgoes push notification news.

I have always received magazines, but I deleted the apps of the magazines and now delete the emails of the articles I plan to read so I can fully appreciate what it means to have the print. That is so I don’t throw the magazine into a pile of other magazines I already read before they arrived. In college, I had an alarm clock that my professor made fun of me for. I just put the batteries in an Ikea alarm clock that also tells me the temperature. My phone charges at night, far away from me. In acquiring more things for myself that keep me away from the phone I have come to hate, I am beginning to feel lighter. Despite having more essentials, more things to keep track of. Believe it or not, a heavy bag feels more like a privilege than a burden now.

There is this doomsday idea that we are lost, we continue to lose ourselves, and the basic parts of life that offer us an anchor to living. But I believe, like anything, that we are closer to getting it back than we are to slipping away forever. It’s not that most people see it that way, likely. We’ve lost so much it’s hard to wrap our heads around getting it all back. I am in the habit of always finding the positive, which is to say, at the very least, we now know what we really don’t want to live without. There is a sense that we won’t lose it again.

Part of the reason we allowed our lives to come to this point is that we were told there was no other way to live. That it was already happening, that we should let it happen, or be so far in the past we could never catch up with our future. But I believe we now see that there has always been a choice about how we live and continue to live. I guess what I mean to come here and say is that while so much has been lost to a modern life that we have been told is inevitable, the truth is we can always go back the way we came. Find what has been lost, and reject the idea that it is gone for good. While I may still hear of all this losing, I know myself to be finding it all again. I am picking up the pieces of my life, and I know that so many other people are too. Through scrapbooking, and snail mail, prints, physical media, reading, dumbing down our phones, being present in a moment, and a million other things we didn’t even realize had been swept away. It’s nice to see all these pieces again.

I was getting my tarot read at an event the other night, and the woman who did the reading asked me to describe my current moment the best I could. I said it was like the ending of Chiquitita, the ABBA classic. What I meant was the moment right before the piano plays them out, when you’re holding your breath a little because you know it’s coming. I have a sense that the world is there too, though maybe not as right on the cusp as I feel. There is a sense that the sadness in what has been lost is waning, and new hopes and dreams are rising somewhere in the distance. I am sure of this because I see it, like a small glimmer of light in the sky, telling you a new day is on the horizon.