We As a Society Are All Alone Together - A Review of Eric Pickersgill Photography

I just love this picture and I thought it would make a fitting introduction for my first LIFESTYLE post. You see, I'm a staunch SteemLEO advocate, but I can't be writing about central bank digital currencies and other digital assets all the time. So I'm looking to add another couple homes for my STEEM life. Being that one-life.io was advised on their token economy by @khaleelkazi and the guys at SteemLeo Labs, I thought I'd give this tribe a try.

The picture above is from a series of photos by Eric Pickersgill called "Removed", which simply removes the cellphones from our social photography and renders the shots in black-and-white.

The results are striking.

I was alerted to this series of shots by this QZ article, though I have no idea how I stumbled across it.

The first series was made in and around North Carolina, near where I'm from, which might explain why I was so drawn to the images in the first place. They have an eerie sort of familiarity to me. The second series was made in and around Southeast Asia, near where I live in China.

There is something odd about these pictures. Those people included in the frame without a phone looked lost. The odd man out. The person who, try as they may, just doesn't get the joke.

We live in a society that has been utterly transformed within the space of little over a decade. The iPhone was introduced on June 29, 2007. I remember distinctly what I was doing that day. My girlfriend and I were returning from a week at the beach and I heard the news recap of the day while I was driving south into the sunset on a lonely highway in rural North Carolina. I thought "What the fuck is Apple doing releasing a phone? That is going to kill their iPod sales!"

And it did.

Only the sales of iPhones soon far surpassed that of the iPod. Like by a lot.

We all know the story after that. Apple became the world's first trillion-dollar company. Every other cellphone company either copy-catted Apple's steez or went bankrupt. A whole new crop of copycatters came up out of China and now here we are. My damn iPhone even tells me how much life it is sucking out of me. According to my iPhone X, last week I spent an ungodly amount of time staring at my stupid smartphone.

Like, whoa. And that's down 32% from last week! That's embarrassing. And that doesn't even include the time I spend at work staring at a computer screen. I don't even like looking at my smart phone and it is literally a full-time job for me (40 hours a week) looking at the freakin' thing.

How did we as a society get to this point?

What the hell are we doing to ourselves? Is this the lifestyle we want to lead? What can we do to stop this?

I'm open to suggestions. Truly I am. Because smart phones, AI, IoT, games, AR, VR, all that shit... It's only getting better from here. Can we resist the Siren Song of technological distraction?