Curse of the Goldfish Generation — Standards to Meet
Miniscule memory, diminishing attention span, a constant need for validation, and (a more recent addition) doomscrolling tendencies — this is the heaven that the Goldfish Generation has spun out for itself. But what is the real curse?
A year apart and everything remains unchanged. This may be hyperbole, but to some extent, things characteristic of the life we stepped into when the year began are persistent in continuing here. We are still living with the virus and lockdowns that have been rolled out and back through multiple phases. A new sense of vigilance has dawned over everybody and this, they carry along for every trip outside their home/niches. All talk about a post-COVID world continues through webinars and discussion forums but the exact timing of its arrival cannot be surmised with certainty yet. But business goes on — just not like usual.
This year, resolutions may not be the same. It might even be scarce. A lot of what we might have — under normal circumstances — reserved for the yearly habit of making and breaking promises to oneself, has already been taken out of the box and experimented with during the months that shooed us into our homes and away from the buzz of an outer world. Amidst all the trials and errors of working through lost talents and prolonged room-bound activities, one thing that we may have realized is how we truly are a part of the Goldfish Generation. More so than anybody else could have deliberated it for us, we’ve checked all boxes for qualification. Call it a curse or give it any fancy term equivalent to gross disaffection, but our device-centric lives are being held responsible for the reduced attention span and deep slumps of productivity.
Add to this, the overwhelming abundance of productivity guides on YouTube and Instagram and any post-able platform. People chart out a journey for you: follow this, follow that, do not do this, do not do that. And finally, you end up pitting your own trajectory of progress against the over-achieving resume of these wise men (and women) who are on an altruistic mission to hold the door to productive living open. It’s almost as though you hear Goethe’s words echo as he says “no intelligent man experiences a minor stupidity”. A distasteful scorn is all you need from such voices to feel you’re not good enough. The influencer trend has engraved some destructive patterns onto our social media presence. What you’ve done through procrastination — which is allowed — could very well be struck off as stupidity, if men like Goethe were to hold a microscope over our 10(am) to 1(am) days. The real curse of the Goldfish Generation isn’t our reduced attention spans but the standards that our beloved screens hold for us to meet or be left out as the odd ones. We’re stuck starving for validation — you see people your age do things that do not seem likely to happen to you anytime soon; you see life in all its perfection (although you can’t really read the reality when social media can be a conflicting representation of it) and throw yourself down a spiral of destructive comparison. An utterly pessimistic ride follows — there’s nothing quite conspicuously pretty about this picture of parallels and non-parallels. Circumstances and individual specificities are all overlooked when we’re busy playing a game of who-does-what-best.
Even content creators — who do find a massive audience on platforms like Instagram for the work they produce — are driven to feel inadequate because they can’t keep up with the unwritten rule of posting every day. Perhaps the algorithm mandates this. You work and work, squeezing out every last bit of creative juice in your mind to keep up with invisible gestures of ‘encore’ from a digital crowd. The result is exhaustion.
What is the best way out of this? A digital ‘detox’? More and more users are choosing to take a break from their presence online because they feel like they’re running ahead of their normal selves. The toxic need to be there and be tormented by falsities of flawlessness really does get incredibly overwhelming. If you find it too hard to stack your phone and tabs away, there’s a relatively easier step too, which is deletion. Sifting through the feeds you follow and deciding what does good for you and what doesn’t is absolutely necessary. Whether you choose to detox or delete, it would only be for the good then.
