Lawyers Road Review

It’s New Years again. The odometer of our lives rolls over and there doesn’t seem to be anyway to slow it down or stop it. The brake pedal has gone spongey and the accelerator is stuck. We never have enough time. Instead, we live in a time famine.

I sense someone has hit the fast forward button on the cassette deck of our time such that events whirl past and we barely notice them.

We don’t take Time, Time takes us.

Some observations endorse this theory.

In our cars we are barely missed by speeders weaving in and out of traffic. We ourselves barely miss striking those pedestrians who insist on crossing the street in the middle of a block with heavy oncoming traffic without the assistance of the Walk / Don’t Walk sign at a corner as little as 20 yards away.

Recently I saw a man doing this with a walker. That is right, the guy is disabled. Yet 20 yards away was a controlled intersection with Walk and Don’t Walk signs. Fortunately, the brakes all worked on the oncoming cars and he made it. Was his time so valuable he had to risk injury and death to save the time crossing with the light?

How many times have you encountered a similar event where the pedestrian who may be in a crosswalk, but has failed to heed the Don’t Walk sign as he or she has their head down and their attention wrapped around a cell phone? I laid on the horn once and the young woman finally looks up at me with surprise and contempt, as if I have somehow violated her personal space.

We are in a famine caused not by war, natural disaster or a failed crop. Time itself is scarce. It my bet it is these machines you read this on that has caused it.

Social media is free. You can sign up for any number of platforms and not surrender a dime.

Instead, what you surrender is your time.

Then social media mines the iron ore of your mind. Your preferences, interests, desires are all consumed by the machine, digitized and decisions far, far from your home are made about what gets manufactured and put on the market.

I am not making this up. Consider this image from my anti-virus software appeared on my screen while I was in the process of editing this post.

This man has your data. And he his selling it. Shouldn’t he be taxed on the collection of our data?

Additionally, you surrender on some level just who you are. Your soul is laid bare to the autocracy of the social media giants, who in turn can sell what they have harvested to political or other interests to supercharge what might have been only one man’s opinion. It is leached from you and combined with the rest to form data to serve the machine.

Before you know it conspiracy theories abound with all manner of tragic consequences.

This is what I am tell you all. Resist temptation to be part of a data mine or work as a slave or whatever the devices want from you. Open your door, walk outside and greet your neighbor. Leave your cell phone behind.

It’s quite refreshing.

We are in a time famine. Fight it. Turn this machine off and do not look back.