“We keep on waiting, waiting….”

“Upon noticing her absence, the court decided that it preferred the windup bird anyway. With the real nightingale you could never tell what was going to be sun; with this bird everything was settled,” (Desser 276).

If that metaphor isn’t obvious, then I don’t know what is.

It’s an old warning we’re completely immune to now. “Don’t get so caught up in all your electronics; make sure to appreciate nature sometimes too!” I’m pretty used to hearing this sort of thing, especially as time goes on and technology grows.

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So what do I think that first quote is trying to blare at us? That humanity is slowly (or not so slowly) growing to prefer the inorganic over organic because it is more easily controlled. Well, control is something we seem to want a lot of, naturally. That’s a fact no one can argue completely.

So it would seem we’ve chosen the mechanical version of happiness over the original because we get to determine the when and what and why of this happiness. We get to control when the bird sings and what it sings.

“The poor fisherman, however, who heard the windup bird, said, ‘It sounds prettily enough, and the melodies are all alike, yet there seems to be something wanting, I cannot exactly tell what,'” (ibid).

No, no, we hear you. We need to take a step back and realize the greatness of the original, appreciate nature and all that.

And it’s completely infuriating that so many people still need to take this advice to heart.

The 180° flip of tone is not on accident: I’m actually in full agreement with this quote. There are scientific studies that have proven humans require contact with nature; require face-to-face communication. Living life through the internet, living where social connections are experienced only virtually, is the equivalent to living in isolation. And I don’t think it’s news to anyone that humans are social creatures that go insane when in complete isolation for extended periods of time. Anyhow, some people may like how internet communication works—mostly text based and very controlled—but many people can probably recognize the lonely feeling they get after spending hours online. It’s not face to face, and no matter how high-quality the webcam during a skype session, there is no equivalent to actual, human, in-person conversation. There’s a whole science about how technology is making people grow more and more distant from each other, and in turn, more unhappy. What I’m trying to argue is that some people need to realize this and that it is in fact necessary for their psychological being to have a physical relationship with someone. (Physical here meaning actual.)

I’m not saying I’m exempt from this, nor am I accusing anyone in this class of the same, but I am saying how fed up I am with how oblivious humanity seems to be to the real song bird flying out the window.