What Keeps the Human Machine going

Have you noticed how all media players turn themselves off once out of your attention. If you don't push any buttons the computer, the tv or even the phone turns to standby mode without voicing anything. I don't mind it, but  I realised that people seem to behave more in the same direction which I believe it's not exactly healthy. We, as humans, begin to expect less from the people we interact with: turn off the conversation as soon as we are bored with it, we don't say hello or good bye because we get straight to the point or ignore the simple salute of a neighbour. And I realised this as I felt one day I was missing a message from something that was speaking a few hours ago and now the house was in complete quietness. It's a bit scary to think of it this way. However, the tv was on a few hours ago and as I ignored it for a couple of hours, it turned itself off without letting me know. And I realised the simple good bye interaction would make me feel a little bit cared for. I am afraid to admit that the human interaction is what keeps us going. It's not the house, not the land and the objects we possess, but the pure human interaction. That is how we all know we are cared for somehow. That is how we learn to deal with our fears, our hopes and dreams. We need to hear a voice gently speaking to us, crying or screaming from time to time. And this is a little bit the usual we take for granted or suggest we don't need in favour for the technology we use. No matter how boring or how exciting a conversation turns out to be, we love the simple chattering which makes our brains function better than just auditioning some electronic show made for perishability. In a comic way I can say the oil that makes the human machine work is the human interaction in all its joy, boredom or sadness.

Urban anthropology

I get to walk down the street and up the street in search for inspiration from time to time and I find that there are a lot of characters with probably interesting stories to tell. For example, I noticed there are some street people who live in the same neighbourhood they know for years. The funny thing is they don't have a home, but they continue to stay down the streets they know. They could be nomads and try to find shelter somewhere else, but they prefer the known land. And one day I saw this street woman who was giving advice to a new mother walking her baby. I found it charming because for one moment she was no longer lower, socially speaking, but an equal or even higher in terms of knowledge. I am always afraid of these people because I don't believe I get them. And I feel most normal people think like me. Still, I may be wrong in some ways. They are human, after all. And the house is not a condition for being human.

Silence we speak

I took the chance to dare my mind to analyse the speaking that goes on around me. And I realised that no matter how loud and how much we speak, we don't say what we think, we don't express our feelings, we don't dare to say we care, we hide behind our words, our laughter, our voice and we end up doing useless exercises of speech. I see people using words in stories that make them seem different than they are, I see words used to manipulate, I see words being spoken in humiliation. And I believe we are not worthy of our human condition since we are supposed to sit up straight and deal with our fellows bipeds, not lower our heads, not hide our hearts we learned to speak of, not use our hands to speak or to show our superiority. We are meant to use our voice with the wisdom of our mind. Otherwise I believe we are missing the point of being human.

Stand up straight and tell me what you think, feel, want!