Who cares about quality and authenticity when fluff is what everybody wants?

 

Illustration generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E via ChatGPT. Concept and prompt by the author.

In an era in which a real estate baron cum reality TV host known for outrageous comments and an absolute absence of scruples is elected the president of the most powerful country in the world and allowed to treat  nations across the globe as a doormat what is the incentive for people to put a premium on quality and authenticity? The advent of the internet age, which was supposed to usher in an age of egalitarianism where everyone was supposed to get a fair chance at achieving success backed only by talent and hard work, has actually enabled mediocrity, nepotism, fakery and plain nonsense to thrive at the cost of what is right, fair, true and genuine. A monstrosity called the algorithm has ensured that venal and corrupt individuals and greedy and rapacious organisations are able to direct people to serve their vested interests without  the latter even realising it.

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People no longer care to read or engage in deep conversations with anyone. Social media has had a decided role in uneducating people. Nobody cares to read a well-written newspaper editorial anymore. In fact, newspapers are closing down right, left and centre. Leading television channels are an arena for deafening slanging matches where not a single coherent argument is made or a convincing conclusion reached. The online media space has its own dedicated niches where people push their agendas safe in their respective echo chambers.

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Education has become a farce, with real estate builders and people with criminal antecedents opening schools, engineering colleges, medical colleges and universities at will, ripping off hundreds of thousands of gullible students and parents. The entrance tests to the educational institutions of repute are often compromised on account of repeated incidents of test-paper leaks. Mountains and forests are merrily destroyed in the name of development, never mind the poisoned rivers and air that are left in their wake.

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Tyrannical world leaders wage economic and real war to wreck a well-established and perfectly functioning world order, replacing it with global anarchy that could lead to economic collapse and anarchy in nations across the global south. Where have the statesmen and stateswomen of the world gone? Why are we allowing morons, goons and uncouth leaders to assume the mantle of leadership, when many of them really need psychiatric care?

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Of course, everybody talks like they crave authenticity. There is all this talk about following your passion and living mindfully. People are asked to share the stories of failure, hardship and redemption. But scratch the surface, and it is all fluff. People are pretentious and deceitful and not who they show themselves to be. Who would have thought that Bill Cosby, the avuncular comedian everyone doted on, would be such a monster? People like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, as well as the many worthies named in Epstein Files, holding positions of immense authority, have been shown to have a fleet of clay. Whom can the people look up to for inspiration anymore?

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We may be living in the post-truth world, whatever that might mean, and it's possible that people have always been like this, with the lid coming off what was always the way of the world. However, isn’t there a definite feeling that something is off? Like everybody, the whole human race is more diminished than it used to be in the past.

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Man landed on the Moon in 1969, and it was truly a remarkable feat-the culmination of the rise of humans from the forests and caves of their distant past to truly celestial glory. Come 2026 and they send humans to the Moon only to circle it and not touch down. What did anyone feel about that event? Not even deja vu, it came, and it went.

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We don’t put writers, philosophers and scientists on a pedestal. Instead, we worship social media stars with millions of followers whose claim to fame might be crazy and outlandish antics and the ability to shock decent people on account of their facility with expletives. We have passed the stage of expecting there to be a rebound to a world where honest, hard working, decent and competent people would inevitably make it to the top. They cannot. The system is loaded against them. We have reached critical mass in terms of irretrievably being drawn into a morass of mediocrity, dishonesty, gaslighting, conspicuous consumption, and a false sense of entitlement. Far from nursing a damaged moral compass back to health, the world has thrown it away.

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