Day 4003 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Timothy 4:3 NIV

Death by algorithm

Can you imagine having that written on what is that coming certificate which is given unto all of us and records the time we’ve left this earth and even how we managed to leave at what is then the very end of our every life as has been lived by and for and through and to so many different ideas and directions and decisions and divisions and destructions? Each of them combining unto the telling of what is the final page of the story we’d given an entire lifetime to living. All of them to be contained within something that seems only to say that the way we left is the way we’d lived.

Or that barely at all.

For though it quite crushing to consider, the reality is that this time has come. And it’s come in such a measured approach that we didn’t see it coming. We didn’t feel life shifting. We didn’t notice any of the minuteness to any of this. It came, oddly enough, as if a thief in the night. A vagabond sneaking unto the stealing of life as we once knew it, once lived it, live it no more.

No, it pains me to say that we don’t know the way anymore.

We’ve in all honesty not lived life in years. Because real life is filled with fears, tears, trials and torments that try us and test us and break us to best us so that we might be bettered by them all having the gall to know we’re capable of withstanding far more thanks to having had to stand and face the proverbial music that is a life monstrously monotonous. Yes, real life is boring and dull and delightful and painful and every blend of horrid and happy that we could both love and hate.

Seems we’ve still plenty of both of those feelings coursing through our veins into our brains for anymore it seems we either love or hate, and that all of everything. It’s such a strange outcome we’ve come out to find here in this wild of a world gone the same. For inside of every single day we all have so much we do and say that only seems to share this very same message of our being the only ones who feel fit to determine for us what’s best for us.

As if we have any stinking idea what we’re doing or why we keep doing what we often times hate ourselves for having done.

This is the dance that all of life should here endure. This should be a time of growth as is grown only in mistakes made and lessons learned. This should be our season in which we seek for reason as is only the reward of those who embrace repentance thanks to their having found within it reason to win it. This should be a life in which we try to die to what isn’t life.

But no.

Instead we live as if we know not only the entire point and purpose of life itself but that it oddly enough must mean something different to each of us as each of us are filled with so many personal preferences and opinions that anymore all we are is but the caretaker of the lot of them. All it seems that we know to be is just these curators of these museums of we and all we love and the more we hate and why we think it best to never change our opinions, outlooks or outcomes.

All because if we did then we’d prove we’re dead to what was the life that we could have lived had we been a bit more willing then to do those different things that we come to do long before we came to do them.

And we can’t bear the thought of anyone else knowing we’re this wrong.

Much less ourselves.

And that’s because we have to live with ourselves every second of every day that we’re here. And, well, it would only stand to make a long, hard journey only harder and longer were we to all but learn to hate ourselves, distrust ourselves, disrupt our sails from their sailing unto the seas of all these things that we want to be, want to do, want to have, wish to hear. Seas that are always so warm and welcoming that we think nothing of what might await upon the shore on the other side.

Because all we can see is an endless sea of everything that we love and like and thus wish to have inside our lives, inside our eyes, inside our minds. Each of us then filling ourselves with only whatever it is that fills our sails and floats our boats and promises never to rock them so as to wake us up from the slumbering stupor we’ve settled for assuming is the very purpose and thus best use of life itself.

Just us being calmed, coddled and culled in what’s become a death by algorithm.

For that’s all life has come to become here before we the dumb who do only the things that we enjoy and seek then only those things which promise us joy in the measure in which we alone measure it to mean what we alone think it means as is measured in what we alone believe to matter far more than it might. Indeed, how many things have we thought mattered in life only to get a little further down the line and come to find that they meant either far less than we’d imagined or maybe even nothing at all?

Like an xbox that kept a mind locked in a lonely room away from a family having conversations and making memories that I didn’t get to have and now forever don’t get to keep?

That’s one lesson, a chosen thorn stuck into my side by my own hands, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Why? Because it’s, looking back, one of the grossest examples of this idea that I’ve ever had the self-chosen displeasure of having lived thinking it would turn out different. Because it was what I thought I wanted. What I thought would be better than what another had given their time, their attention, their intention, their investment of both money and yet even more of themselves unto choosing for me.

All for me to hand it back, say no thanks, ask them to return it so that I could buy something else.

I will indeed hate myself for that every single day that I may have left.

Why?

Because who am I to look, listen, lean upon another to do only as I think they should when I myself do still so very many things that I eventually come to learn I never should have done?

No, as it’s turning out I’m not the captain of this ship. I’m but the delighted destroyer thereof who’s given his life to blasting holes in its side seeking to see more of that sea of things I want to see, things I want to be, things I think I need and all the ones that I’m convinced I don’t.

Such as how humility is something I know somehow increasingly little of. Or how glory is something I can’t actually do anything with. Or how this life isn’t mine to so mess with and mess up as I have anyway. Or how my way is truly a highway toward a horror that I both can’t imagine and can’t believe I once imagined was worth wanting to visit so often as I have.

Each time chosen because I thought I knew what I was doing, that I knew what was best, that I had everything so figured out that nothing wrong or bad or shameful could happen.

For none of those things ever seem to be seen inside all these plans we’re making and paths we’re taking and promises we’re breaking that we’d once made to the betters we’ve still never been all because it takes a strange kind of courage to hunt them down as they’re found in only that humility that seems to always be the opposite of itself. Because humility is learning to see less of ourselves, only to realize that the less we see of ourselves the more we see we’d previously seen of ourselves.

Leaving us terrifyingly aware that we’ll never be anywhere near where all we’d always thought we already were.

Meaning then that humility itself is something of an entire life lost whilst still the same life in ways so different that the past looks like a book written about another person entirely.

Or at least hopefully.

But unfortunately it seems that this time warned of here having arrived has brought with it a butchering of that hope. For anymore we seem a people only stuck like glue to this growing attitude of our still being the ones who know best. And we prove this very belief inside these tiny little screens through which we live in what’s a life that is absolutely nothing like those we’d lived up until these devices started destroying us back in the summer of 2007.

For thus began the road unto a life of algorithms.

They’re these little computer systems that learn our interests, our intentions and manage to from then forward always place before us exactly what we want to see, show us a daily-refreshed lineup of videos it knows we’ll like to see, send us thus further up that stream that is that sea of endless things that we already like and thus can quickly learn to love without the proverbial paddle to come back down because it knows we’ll let go of any such desire to do so.

For who would turn around from a way of life continually drown in such delights as all these posts and profits telling us we’re right to like all we do and just as right to hate all the more that we then choose to lose the ability, the opportunity to learn from?

No, such is the entire point of our delights. They exist to tell us that we’ve arrived upon the outcome that we were already quite certain they would bring. They prove to us that we should trust in us to be the ones who pick the paths and make the plans and purchase our very own promises in the form of fans and followers who themselves seek only to hear all that we’ll only continue to say so long as the crowds keep gathering to hear our blabbering all about what we exist to share inside a heart that only cares to be heard.

And not about what anyone may hear.

We’ve kind of been on that idea for a couple of days now, that defiant division between hearing and listening. And anymore it’s decided mostly by only what we say and to whom it’s said. And that because we indeed shift our sounds to better please whoever we happen to be around. For some don’t want to hear about this whereas others don’t like talking about that. And so life itself has become this map that is a maze of such this craze of a life that craves something different from us all the time.

And we’ve each become so blind to this time that we find that we feel that it’s our best to always just go along with it.

All because it feels pretty good when it goes along with us.

Such is the algorithm’s purpose. To please us. To soothe us. To entertain us. To pacify us. To satisfy us. To serve unto us what’s a truly endless course of all the content it learns we like, with little built-in buttons that we can click should it be wrong every now and then. Don’t show me that. Don’t tell me that. Don’t remind me of that. Don’t offer me that. Do offer me this. Do say this. Do share this. Bring me more of this and less of that.

Yes “leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!”

Said by a people who still shout unto the seers to “’See no more visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions.’”

Indeed, life itself has become something of an illusion wrapped in a delusion demanded of this dilution of everything from our minds to their ability to think thoughts other than those perfectly catered to those we’ve already thought and feel then no need to rethink or reconsider or perhaps even repent from. No, because we’re not so dumb as to have actually become to life so numb that we know not anything but what we like and insist that those around us only affirm, confirm, conform to our choices to hear only those voices who speak only those lies that tell us our lives are going just fine.

Lies we love because we have become just that dumb to stay that numb in what is a life in which we prefer the lie to the truth as the truth asks only that we lose this audacity to continue believing that we alone know what’s best and, alongside this, confess that we’ve gotten it all more wrong more times than our arrogance is willing or even able to imagine we have.

A truth that is thus reliant upon change in regard to how we’ve lived for those lies for so long in life that we’ll not know life until we do turn around and agree to dry out from our longstanding addiction to ourselves and their afflictions.

Afflictions placated by algorithms feeding our addictions to whatever it is that we’ve taught them we want to hear and don’t want to see. A choice made which has us sat upon the throne in our lives from which we alone continue to decide where we go, what we do, who we are.

But that’s just it friends, who can we be when all we do is go back to that place where all we find is only us pleased?

What happens to that better we can be when all we become is so self-assured that we’re the best we can be already? What becomes of the more we could know when all we continue to learn is only that we’ve already come to think we have fully understood? What’s to happen to those growths we could find, feel when all we find is that we feel best when we have a horde around us telling us how good we already are to feel however we do about whatever it is that we think we like?

Do we even know for sure that we like what we assume we love?

Should we love this life so very much that we dread that day in which we’ll lose it anyway?

Does God truly hate us because He offers to ask us to lose it now so that we can hurry ahead to the hope of what’s still to come?

Should we hate Him because He came to lead the way in what are words that continue to say what feels like swords sent to split us apart from who we’ve become so that we can become the better He alone believes we can be?

Why do we hate ourselves so very much that we’ve come to become this convinced that this is good as it gets, that we are as good as we can become?

Is this not the foundational premise of all those times we’ve sought to hear, to see, to be or believe only whatever we wanted in the past? Looking back, do you truly see the substance of anything that you could call a life? Looking around, do you see anything of life now?

I’m personally losing that ability these days. For I look around and I see nothing of the life I grew up in. Nothing of the world I once felt a happier place. Nothing of the hope I once had for life to continue toward anything of hope at all. This isn’t what I hoped for. In truth I don’t think this is anything anyone hoped for. For who hopes for hatred? Who dreams of division? Who ever got all excited to think we’d be this excited to stay so divided that all of life has only become just us and our phones that we talk to and look at and hear from more than our own families?

Is this truly the very best of our every destiny?

To just each of us separate off into our own little worlds in which we’re so catered to that we never come back out, reach back out, crawl back out toward those we once cared about?

I hate what this life’s become because we’ve all become so lost inside ourselves inside this sea of things that say what we want to hear and show us what we want to see that all we see is but a reflection of whatever it is that we’ve become. But life isn’t meant to be nothing but some mirror made of us. Life is rather a journey toward hope itself.

And friends, again, this just ain’t what I hoped it would be.

Because I grew up in a time of friends, of family, of an honesty that honestly cared far more than we do anymore about the better of those around us, something so often proven in tough love that told us what we needed to hear so that we could become what we probably didn’t have the guts or ability to believe we could be. Not that the past was perfect, but it was a least something we shared.

We don’t even do that anymore.

Nowadays it feels as if we’re bothering someone by asking them to put down their phone for a second so that we can remind them we’re here.

It shouldn’t be that way.

And yet it is that way because we all chose this way in which we live as if we’re the only ones who matter, right up to the point that we’ll not listen to anything we don’t like the sound of. We won’t be bothered by anything, by anyone who dares have a different viewpoint or opinion. In fact, we all but hate everyone who exists on the opposite side of any line that our own hands have drawn in what is this sand of time that we can’t get back.

We get one shot at this.

Is this how we want to spend it? Just us all but entirely dependent upon our being pleased, satisfied, applauded, approved of?

Friends, what all are we missing by thinking that we’ve already found the very best of everything?

My point is that for long enough we’ve gathered around ourselves those people, and now devices, that tell us only what we want to hear. And in doing so we’ve divided ourselves away from everything more we could learn, see, be, become. And we did it because we were afraid of such things as change, humility, hope even. But if all we ever learn to hope in is just the best that we can think of, then we become our very own limits to everything that exists beyond our wildest imaginations.

Why do that to ourselves?

God above is calling all of us toward a life so endless because He has a promise of love, joy, peace the same.

Are we really willing to miss out on that amazing eternity just because it comes in His having come to say that we need to change and turn back for humility’s sake?

No, it’s not easy to hear what we don’t want to hear. Definitely not easy to hear what we probably need to hear. But friends, if all we ever listen to is only what we like the sound of, then again we only become our own barricades to our lives bettered.

So stop settling for assuming that you’re the one best left in charge and welcome instead the audacity to change.

Not because it’s easy but because this other way just ain’t sane.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold