Down The Rabbit Hole And Into Reality

Originally published on inteldaily.com May 2011

The rabbit hole is an analogy that has been used many times, an obvious reference to the extreme shift of perspective experienced by Alice, equally applicable to any earth-shattering change in understanding or perspective. As someone reading this article or articles on similar websites you have probably reached a certain level of realization about the state of things, the falsehood of our media and the less than benign aspects of the moulding of modern society, rape of our planet etc. So welcome to the club, like an increasingly large minority of people, you have woken up from the saccharine dreams of well-behaved and dutiful citizen.

Perhaps you check in on these sites daily or several times a week, like I used to? I’d have to say I became almost addicted to finding out the ‘real news’ and seeing the lies of the mainstream media exposed. All this is well and good, but after a while I began to realize that although my knowledge and understanding of the world had changed, this had little bearing on my own life. In fact, the deluge of negative stories and the depressing hard truth actually tended to make me feel slightly depressed and powerless.

Eventually, I began to realize that after finding out that our governments lie constantly, the financial system is designed to cheat us, ordinary people like me or you are expendable etc etc, there wasn’t really anything else I needed to know – more of the same was just turning me into an internet bad news junkie.
It is rather ironic that the internet, this amazing tool of knowledge proliferation and empowerment, is ultimately part of the problem of how we now live. It is switching people on to hidden truths, despicable lies and thousands of other like-minded individuals, but it is also a portal into virtual living, a digital non-reality that is exacerbating out detachment from the real physical world.

I have email, a facebook page, admin. on a couple of websites but I’ve made a decision to step it all down to a minimum. I don’t check my email daily, my friends on facebook are only people I actually have met and know, I call people instead of texting if I need to write more than 10 words, I spend as much time outside as I possibly can. I realized that it is in the real physical world that we need to make the changes – it’s great being a super buff ninja in cyberspace, but not so great when in reality you are really a 300 pound bald man with a screen tan and no actual physical skills. More and more I see people who have no ‘real life’ skills, their abilities are all virtual – even down to the ability to hold a conversation with another human being.

I find this trend rather worrying and if the various doom-mongers are correct, these virtual skills will be worth little or nothing when we eventually crash into the horrors of a physical resource collapse. In reality there is no restart button, in reality ‘gameover’ really is the end – a concept that many technophiles seeming to be losing touch with.

I’m not suggesting that you smash your laptop and your TV – these things have their uses, but they must be kept in their proper perspective as tools. There are far better tools that we can be utilizing for our own mental and physical health, happiness and survival – face to face communication, practical knowledge and skill acquisition, physical manual tools, space to live in and grow food in, a network of like-minded individuals to share and avail of etc.

We have a chance to change the future, the internet is definitely part of that change, however it is in our own lives and lifestyles that the changes are most urgent and essential. Having woken up to the truth of the nightmare that has been arranged for us modern serfs, it is up to each individual to get up out of the chair and begin physically re-moulding their whole lives; only when this happens will our ideas and dreams of a better life manifest in the real world.