Hayy ibn Yaqzan
A wonderful story from Islamic philosophy.
In short, a baby comes into being on an island where no other human lives, without a mother or father, and is raised by a gazelle.
After the death of his gazelle mother, his process of thinking and searching begins. It continues from living and non-living matter to the stars, all the way to knowing himself and God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rNOBupdiDE
Facebook came into our (my) lives with middle school, smoothly, almost like a software update.
Its target audience was exactly us.
Right at the age when we were trying to build our personalities, it was a place where you could add and remove friends, share your status, collect likes from others, message people, and play games.
Getting likes really mattered.
What would get more likes was relatively predictable, and most of the time, it had less to do with the quality of the content than with the popularity of the person posting it.
You could say that people older than us, and people even older than them, had their own characteristic attitudes and behaviors.
Looking at the bigger picture, some people really did resemble other people.
Online, it became easy to assign types to people.
Shared opinions found each other.
The comments under a single post inevitably came to represent millions of people in our minds.
Another path to becoming famous had opened.
When brands entered social media, we started seeing accounts I could never really warm up to from the beginning, and whose existence most of us still do not really need.
Once we began seeing viral ads, it felt like some flavor had finally entered the whole thing.
When I think about it, if something this new came out when I was middle-aged, and if there were a way for me to make money from it, maybe I would be this aggressive too.
And it seems like smart glasses and the metaverse will arrive just in time for my own middle age.
While children who are about to enter adolescence try to make their avatars appealing to each other there, who knows with what intentions we will be wearing those computers on our faces?
For example, in the Middle Ages, there was a resemblance between the painting on a church wall and the landscape seen through the window beside it.
Today, in a crowded city, that resemblance has evolved into the relationship between the image on a computer screen and the view from the window beside it: mostly cubic, full of rectangles and lines.
This shows that time, people, and nature are constantly in exchange with one another.
Architect Gökhan Avcıoğlu, one of the Turkish Five, says:
“In architecture education, architecture is described as problem-solving. But actually, architecture is about creating problems. It is about turning something into an object of desire, about creating the feeling that you need it. In other words, we create a problem, and then we solve it.”
Especially for people who work in the visual arts, the job is sometimes exactly about creating things we cannot fully put into words.
To make words unnecessary, you have to receive and give the feeling that “it could not have been any other way.”
If we consider that everything we see around us, including buildings, is created through empathy and agreement between these two sides, then which side is deceiving the other more?
Can someone who sells sketchbooks and paints to people in front of a pleasant view guarantee that beautiful work will come out of it?
So many moments in our lives, when something happens to us for the first time and we react in that instant, continue shaping our future.
Motivation does not always have to come from TED Talks. We can also take it from the falls in our own lives, from our problems, and from the things that bother us.
At least for me, a bad mood is an effective fuel.
The code of life that many wise people, scholars, Socrates, and plenty of others up to today have discovered within themselves or through reading, and agreed on, is “know yourself.”
And knowing yourself happens while you are in motion.
I am talking about the damage caused by the break in reality that happens when the word “everyone” is used carelessly.
For example, it hurts me that the sentence “everyone knows everything” does not sound strange at first.
If we hear this and similar unreal generalizations often throughout the day, I think we contaminate our subconscious with them.
Because when it is said without thinking, the group included in that generalization is static and predictable in the speaker’s mind.
It is a picture of “everyone” built from the speaker’s past experiences and the comments they have read.
It belongs to the speaker, and only to them.
I wonder how many people have experienced this. I have slipped into it once or twice:
Do you want everyone to see the post you shared on Instagram?
Then let’s post it at the hour when people are most active.
Let me Google it:
“most active hours on Instagram”
“what time do people in Turkiye use Instagram the most”
🙁
If that big reset people talk about came through a solar flare, and Facebook and Google no longer existed, would all the ways we have hurt each other have been worth it?
