Hornswoggled is a polite way of saying deceived or lied to without the cuss words. Boy, the way we’ve been treated is so full of lies that if they were not so off putting, cuss words would be in order. What am I talking about? Follow along, grasshopper, and you will soon see the illusion.
Way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, computers were invented. Soon after that they became a fixture in our lives, and today, we cannot do without them. They promised a brighter future, one with more time for, well, whatever you do for fun when you have the time. But we had to wait expectantly. Dial-up (some of you kids out there never experienced the gnashing of teeth while waiting for a program to download or a connection to the internet to be established) was slow and inconvenient. The promise was that it would all get better. We believed them.
Then came DSL and everyone cheered. Now everything moved a little faster, but still not fast enough to recover the time lost with dial-up. We cheered anyway because we knew better things would soon arrive. They did. We got connected to cable followed closely by Wi-Fi and it seemed the world was ours. We didn’t notice the little changes going on behind the scenes.
Computer viruses were invented and along with that came a host of programs one could buy to keep your computer from becoming infected. These all required endless updates, time to run them, and a yearly fee. On top of that, software, once owned by the one who bought it now became available through subscription only. Computers were cheap to buy, but the internet connection fees and subscription fees of all the programs one used now caused people to need to work in the salt mines a little longer to afford these luxuries.
In addition to the above stealth changes, there was one that got by most people. After the calculator was introduced, kids stopped being able to do math in their heads. The computer was training us to depend on it just like the calculator. The dependency affected our brains and some parts of them went dark as if the light was turned out. But other parts were lit up like the Strip in Vegas. Serotonin flowed through our brains and the more that flowed, the more we wanted.
Computer games, social media, and all of the platforms that feature short clips are designed to keep your attention, raise your serotonin levels and shorten your attention span. They are designed to do this in such a way that we become convinced that we are having fun or saving the world or whatever when we are just feeding an addiction and disengaging from the real world. To top it off, it’s costing us more and more to feed this addiction, which means more hours working.
Now we will add in another chemical our bodies make-cortisol, a chemical that appears when we are under stress. What’s to stress about? WWIII? Poison in our food? Terrorists? Pandemic? These global threats raise our cortisone levels but on a personal level, our computers are also responsible for dumping a lot of this chemical in our blood as well as consuming our time. Just logging into a site can discombobulate you.
First comes the Kamchatka to prove we are not a robot and then the user name and password. Horse patooey! The password saved in our browser somehow doesn’t work and we must now go through the “recover password” series which includes another Kamchatka and a two step authentication process using our phone or another email. OK, now we got our new password and we have to go back, enter it, go through another Kamchatka and two step authentication to finally get in. Imagine doing this several times a day. The cortisone rises!
But wait! Another situation arises. Your neighbor is outside and you need to thank them for the zucchini they left on your porch this morning. But the cortisol is rising even more because your serotonin levels have fallen and you feel this strong need for more. Then you remember you have to pay a bill online before you forget. Suddenly, you are wrapped up in trying to log in to the address to pay your bill. Your Facebook dings. Someone gave you a like. You need that rush so you take a side trip to collect the rush then back to trying to pay the bill which takes a two factor identification but your phone died and you didn’t put in an email to send the code to as a backup. The cortisone rises. You look outside and your neighbor has gone inside. The birds are singing outside, but you don’t care.
Suddenly, you find yourself wishing for a better way to identify yourself and you start thinking that it sure would be nice to have some sort of ID that worked on all sites in all situations to make it easy to log on. Maybe it could be in the form of a chip in the hand so you wouldn’t lose it. Horse patooey! All the cortisone has made your brain less able to reason. Add to that a little adrenaline from the anger stirred up, which also confuses thinking, and the constant craving for more serotonin and you are likely to make decisions you will later regret.
Between chasing the likes, getting a better score on that game, finding the best deals, dealing with the increased security that’s supposed to protect you but only makes you mad, and watching that cat video, your life is being filled with purpose. Someone else’s purpose. You are a good consumer who has been hornswoggled into believing that the horse patooey you are being served is really buttermilk biscuits.
Go outside. Listen to the birds sing and talk to the squirrels.