The World Unplugged
Time to brick the abrasiveness
For a decade, my life revolved around the sterile corridors of banking. Each morning, I’d slide into my car in Douglasdale, pointing it toward the gleaming tower at 100 Grayston Drive in Sandton. The commute was a ritual of endurance, back and forth through Sandton’s relentless traffic, often stretching to an hour or more each way. On heavy days, it ballooned to three hours total, a slow crawl of brake lights and exhaust fumes. To pass the time, I’d flick on the radio, tuning into the news. It became my constant companion, accumulating up to two hours a day of headlines, analyses, and urgent dispatches from around the globe. What did it all mean? In retrospect, nothing profound. It was just noise filling the void between home and office, a soundtrack to the gridlock.
These days, I’ve severed that tie. I never listen to the news anymore. Occasionally, I’ll pause in front of a random TV screen in a waiting room or stumble upon a social media post that catches my eye, but that’s it. The world feels increasingly unhinged, a cacophony of chaos that I’d rather tune out. Power rests in the hands of abrasive leaders, men and women who wield insults like weapons and thrive on division. There’s not a single figure among them reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s quiet strength and moral clarity. Take the so-called leader of the free world, for instance: his love for barbs and attacks has tipped the global balance, leaving the world not improved, but more fractured. Wars rage on multiple fronts, desperation creeps into everyday lives, jobs evaporate in economic whirlwinds, and trade wars echo the petty squabbles of medieval rogues and kings from a more primitive era.
I’m no ideologue. I’m not “woke”, nor am I an asshole reveling in cynicism. I’m a liberal at heart, guided by a core set of values that prioritize human progress, advancing society toward equity, innovation, and shared prosperity without the extremes of dogma.
One night, I had this vivid dream that lingers with me still. Every mobile phone on the planet suddenly bricked, dead, useless slabs of glass and metal. The youth wandered the streets like zombies, disoriented and adrift without their digital lifelines. The older folks, unfazed, retreated to their cars, turning on the radios that still hummed with life. Like those trips of mine to Sandton. I logged onto my laptop, and the internet chugged along as if nothing had happened, the fibres, the CDNs, all functioning smoothly. But strangely, there was no mention anywhere of the global phone blackout, no frantic updates or viral panic.
I woke up with the details etched in my mind, so sharp that I instinctively reached for my own phone to check if it was real. It wasn’t, of course. But in that moment of clarity, I realized what my subconscious was telling me: I’m trying to brick the bad news, to render it inert and powerless in my life. In a world drowning in digital deluge, perhaps the greatest act of self-preservation is simply unplugging from the frenzy. But the better solution is to create your own story, you own content, your own life. You own sense of reality and like the wings of a butterfly start a wind to trigger subliminal forces to reverse the madness.
In a perfect world, (or if I had as much dosh as Jeremy Clarkson) I’d be riding around on a tractor and farming potatoes. Rubberbanding from my digital quests back to where I started on Oakvilla Farm.