I’m tired.

Dinidh O'Brien
3 min readSep 8, 2020

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I’m tired of it all.

I’m tired of rational, respectful discourse and nuance being dead. I’m tired of cut-throat partisanship and the discarding of morals and decorum. I’m tired of people trivialising communication, reducing it to cartoon faces and worn-out memes. I’m tired of true relationships being slain at the altar of digital communications and social media. I’m tired of push notifications and things that are trending. I’m tired of influencers and the incessant reach for online celebrity, millions clamouring for someone — anyone — to pay attention to them no matter what debasement is required. I’m tired of TV screens with aesthetic people feeding us selective truth and bias confirmation. I’m tired of people rejecting knowledge in favour of feelings.

I’m tired of watching as the world ignores climate change and the unrest that may soon turn to war. I’m tired of being sickened by those in power unwilling to do anything about it, all for the sake of bits of paper with numbers on them. I’m tired of the encroachment of large companies into every aspect of our lives, surreptitiously siphoning off privacy and freedom while keeping us distracted with new shiny toys to play with. I’m tired of being coerced into a socio-economic system where people are treated as single-use objects of output to be discarded when it become convenient for those in the upper echelons.

We know this — all of this — is wrong. When Netflix is turned off and there’s nothing left to scroll through on social media we feel restless, unfulfilled. We wander the aisles of stores filled with all the wrong choices looking to fill the holes that exist perhaps because of the aisles themselves. Progress, we call it, as another over-priced coffee shop is erected in another gentrified neighbourhood; our state-sanctioned psychoactive now even less of a drive as we yell our desires at a metal box with pictures on it. Progress we call it, as more of the Earth is ripped apart to fulfil our every fleeting whim.

The status quo must change, and time is running out before we no longer have the power to sway its direction. Maybe you’ve even started to feel it too, sitting there reading these words. Some days it feels like malaise — an unease — others, excitement, but underlying it all and in every corner of the globe there seems to be an electricity in the air. We watch as the proverbial storm of socio-ecological showdown rolls in off of the water and comes barreling towards us and we cannot help but be terrified and exhilarated all at once. We know that within that quickly-approaching storm lies the power to disturb us, and perhaps to be disturbed is what we desperately need. Perhaps to be shaken out of our slumber and awoken to our true state of affairs an abrupt but vital action before our ability to care has withered and died. Or perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps the storm is not here to disturb, but to destroy. Perhaps our attention has been too long drawn towards immaterial things, and it’s too late to reach high ground before we are overwhelmed by the deluge that is to come.

But I don’t really know any of this. All I know is that I’m tired of it all, and where there was once the desire for action now remains only the desire to escape.

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Dinidh O'Brien
Dinidh O'Brien

Written by Dinidh O'Brien

Privacy enthusiast. Technoskeptic with a tech startup. Humanist. Co-Founder -> https://hyperhumans.ai

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