Bits and pieces of information bombard us today at a pace that was not imagined just a few years back. News commentaries flash pictures and Zoom faces and facts laced with opinions and opinions minus facts at us so quickly, we often don't know what is happening, but after viewing, we feel a bit more anxious, a bit edgier than we did at daybreak. The world seems scarier and less safe.
Tic Toc and Facebook dart in front of us with chopped-up pieces of our friends, family, and strangers' lives. Our response defaults to what we learned starting at infancy, and we compare our progress to theirs. We frequently come up lacking in talents, looks, or accumulated assets.
Our anxiety and insecurity replace gratitude, and we forget just how much better our lives and well-being are compared to our grandparents. We, then, make up fairy tales of a past world without woe to prove to ourselves our angst or anger at society or democrats or republicans are validated. Technology has thrown us into a fragmented world we unwittingly accept as reality. However, an important element is missing- context.
Context (noun) is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
