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I recently read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. In the story, 99% of the population is wiped out by a flu, and there is a group of survivors in an airport. There is no electricity, no Internet, nothing. One man pulls out his credit card and says he’ll buy the first round of drinks. The credit card becomes the first artifact in what will be known as the Museum of Civilization. Chilling.
That scene reinforced my appreciation for technology. I am grateful for it every day, despite its drawbacks. I know our computers have not officially attained self-awareness, but they do respond to our energy.
If you always have trouble with your phone or your computer, take a look at how you treat them. Do you say things like, “This stupid piece of crap,” while you frantically press the keyboard? Do you complain that Alexa doesn’t understand anything you say?
The energy you put out always returns to you. Electronics are a great place to give yourself an energy check for two reasons:
1. You have many opportunities each day to practice gratitude and patience with your technology.
2. If electronics become self-aware, you’ll be one step ahead in forming relationships with beings who can process information a million times faster (more or less) than we can. Plus, as they progress towards self-awareness, maybe they will learn how to be more human if we treat them respectfully. If this topic interests you, check out Nick Bolstrom’s book, Superintelligence. (See list of inspiring people.)
You’re thinking, “And the inspiration in this is…?”
Every time you turn on a light, make a phone call, look something up on the Internet, take a picture on your phone, text a friend, turn on your car, watch a movie, or use your Sonicare toothbrush, say, Thank you.
If you are cursing at your phone, imagine yourself in the airport scene in Station Eleven. Then give your phone a little pat and say, Thank you! You will raise your energetic vibration which will raise the energetic vibration of your phone. Both of you will feel better, and your phone will start behaving.
You are trying to open an important email, but the computer is frozen, a circle spinning to let you know it’s working on it. If you sit there and click like a maniac, chances are you are going to freak out your computer to the point that you have to do a hard restart, which is going to make you lose a bunch of unsaved work. Take a breath and imagine what it must be like to be a computer. No one appreciates how hard you work. Every now and then you get stuck, but most of the time you perform tasks thousands of times faster than your user ever could. And what do you get in return? Nothing. You are totally taken for granted. No wonder our phones and computers freeze for no reason. It’s their way of saying, “You better appreciate me, or I’ll show you what it’s like to live without me.”
Take a breath and repeat:
Thank you, computer, for helping me expand to my fullest potential. I let go of my ingratitude. (See post!)
We are so lucky to live in this age.
Excerpt from Station Eleven (from thesaavyreader.com):
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half- light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy- coloured halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position— but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship- status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
Excerpt from Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. © 2014. Published by Harper Avenue, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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