Peak Abstraction

Saturday mornings are sometimes spent at the lake nearby – walking/jogging around it. A few weeks ago, I saw a few dressed-for-exercise folks spending the entire time doing an intense “exercise” – posing for selfies! To be fair, the lake is pretty, but..

It led me to an interesting line of thought. Before I let you in on that, some context setting, or you might close the tab at the ridiculousness of it. Given that the species has lacked telepathy, we have been abstracting for a very long time. Sensations, emotions and thoughts that make up our subjective reality needed to be conveyed. We converted them into everything from facial expressions and actions to drawings to language – spoken, written and then published soon as we entered the machine age. You are now reading what I am thinking. 

As means of communications advanced, our levels of abstraction in that context has moved from physically meeting others to letters to calls to emails to Likes. Social network now means something online, do you realise what that implies? And it isn’t just communication – we have moved from natural sounds to musical instruments to synthesisers. Amazon recommends me books and Netflix surfaces shows based on machine learning without ever asking me anything. From shampoo to food, natural ingredients are getting replaced with equivalents that are almost the real thing. Pills do everything from “fixing” vitamin deficiencies to depression. You buy a product because you trust “the brand”. Money is an abstraction for value and/or worth, fame is an abstraction for popularity and/or talent. There are abstractions of love, and love as an abstraction is debatable, but you get the point – there is possibly an abstraction for everything. In fact, our decisions are based on abstractions of thinking/intelligence – either our own biases (genetic + environmental determinism) or the opinions of others. Come to think of it, even the idea of “self” is an abstraction – a mental construct built on the basis of feelings, emotions and sensations at any point.

Which brings me to the thought – with all of the posturing of perfect lives on every social platform, do you think that over a period of time, we will abstract happiness as well? Chemicals can already change our feelings of happiness for short durations. But beyond that, would our signaling of happiness, and others believing it, become our measure of our own happiness? Call me silly, but what if I’m proven right? Would that be dystopian or utopian?