As a child, I can remember having horrible nightmares. Thank goodness they were just dreams, and I could be comforted to realize I was safe. When others have these terrifying moments in life, who helps to comfort them?
There are many things in life today that can cause us to feel overwhelmed, frightened, nervous, and have an array of emotions. Who is telling us it will be okay and solutions will be found?
Keeping up Appearances
Do you value the opinions of others? As a business, we care about what customers think and ask them to take a quick survey after interacting with us. I experienced this recently after an online chat with customer service for a retail department store. I never physically saw who I spoke with on the other end, just a name.
Are we headed toward faceless interactions with only words in our customer service experiences? In another incident, I did speak with an individual but never physically saw anyone as we spoke on the phone.
Today, I will be heading to a department store to talk to someone in the customer service department. I will physically speak to someone to retrieve a package from the store. I am looking forward to seeing how this experience will be for me.
I am noticing more self check out lanes and fewer lines for physical employees to check you out from the store. Do you like the self-check, or do you like having someone check your items out for you?
Appearances
These changes I am seeing and experiencing are appearances not isolated to the area I live. We have this in every location across the United States and beyond our borders.
I miss the interactions with people. I want to say hello, ask questions and meet people. We seem to want to keep cutting out things to make things go faster, reduce costs and, at the same time, isolate people. Shopping is a social activity. The shutdowns and gas prices have turned me into a more online shopper. However, I am trying to fight it and return to the stores.
Keeping up
We must slow down and enjoy the people we share the world with as we grow. The violence we see and continue to have is a layer of many issues. If we do not get to know others and begin to look at our world to not just keep up with appearances, it will soon overwhelm us with the problems being created. We do not want to create spaces where they are always posed to look great in photos but actually to be great!
The terrifying thought of not having contact with other people is flashing in my mind. How many people do you interact with in a day? Are you having honest conversations face-to-face, or are you texting? How about social media platforms? Are you worried about all of these changes happening to cut off our human contact?
Terrifying thoughts on this Thursday may be just part of my dreams again, but it seems a little scary to me. Nightmares of a society shrinking into a non-contact society lacking the ability to know all the feelings we need to function.