Social media has become the untutored scrolling thumb of a restless time-traveler.
Children carry the scales by which they seek to be measured in their pockets.
A vital glowing screen
that tells them their worth in the eyes of strangers - before they have even measured their own thoughts.
A yardstick no longer made of wood
or sense
or logic - but made of noughts and ones
and which gives approval in numbers
a shifting measure where the scales move
every time a stranger from a different country approves - or disapproves!
No-one even checks the sky to see if it is morning
checking instead their feed to see if they are relevant first.
Approval is a ghost they chase through a hall of smoke and mirrors.
Not the thrill of a race well run,
not the slow reading of a book,
read,
absorbed,
finished,
understood and enjoyed - but a quick,
hollow hit of number chasing.
Any achievement is lost.
The "best" is a cold,
tall peak
where the air is too thin for a child to breathe,
yet they climb,
measuring their soft,
growing bones
against the steel architecture of a curated lie.
The beautiful sunset seen from the peak of the understanding of the book
is ignored for the sake of its very likeness
created on a screen
by a computer
from somewhere in the world.
We have taught the child to outsource their joy,
to hand their compass to a machine
that doesn't even know what real joy is.
They stand in the center of their own bright lives,
waiting for a world they cannot touch - and that they cannot have,
to tell them they have finally arrived.
The idea that this arrival
or that a definition of joy
is now something determined by an algorithm
on a server
on the other side of our world
rather than by the person who is looking into this mirror.
This is not something
as adults
we should ever ignore
and is not something we should ever walk away from.
