There’s a little rectangular hole in our pockets through which time seems to pour through. Do you know how to plug it? I can’t seem to find a way.
I will often sign grand contracts with myself to shut off the rectangle’s siren songs, to cast off its tyrannical shackles. Unfortunately, no amount of gnashing and trashing can fully rip out its hooks from my mind. Any respite is temporary, any hard earned freedom is soon lost to the rectangle’s weight.
Whenever you think you have forgotten it it will call you back. A vibration, a chime, a blink. Its tendrils snake their way back up into your mind, always creeping back into their spots. Even its silence is loud, feeling its weight in your pocket can be enough to trigger a compulsive look.
What harm could it do? A simple look, a single check.
But a single glance into the pit will drag you back in. The rectangle won’t release you again until you have consumed all it can give you, and its well of content is bottomless. That’s what it is, content. Grey, formless, tasteless entertainment. You might occasionally find a gem in the muck, a gold nugget in the stream of mental garbage flowing out of the rectangular abyss, but you won’t retain it. The deluge of content is too great, the flow too fast. You become a pipe to nowhere, consuming without purpose. The more of its nectar you consume, the more thirsty you become.
When the rectangle fully grips you, you loose your sense of self and time. When I wrest back control from it I often find that time seems to flow slower. I become aware again, blinking away a mental fog I did not know was there. The long stretches of time dedicated to the rectangle are akin to bouts of amnesia, as if someone had taken a scalpel to my time on this earth and sliced off a stretch of it.
Sometimes I wonder how much of myself has been shaped by the rectangle. Has it wormed its way into my mind deep enough to reshape its structure? Thoughts can bubble into my mind during a conversation which I know do not belong to me. It’s often a chunk of content I have consumed which my mind has vomited back up to the surface of my consciousness. If I notice it I can discard it, but am I always able to recognize it for what it is?
Now the rectangle has started speaking back to us, it has consumed our collective consciousness and formed an odd reflection of ourselves. The GPTs are burrowing deeper into our minds through the rectangle, shaping what we think and what we ask. The dark mirror in our pockets has altered the reflection we see, how much of this reflection still belongs to me?
If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.