Overstimulation by Technology and Gross Triple Chocolate Cake
by Sabrina Dawkins
I traveled from the small city I moved to, to the large one I grew up in to visit. Every time I go back home, I am met with more technology and flashing lights. New buildings are popping up everywhere, and small forests of trees are cleared to make room for large apartment complexes. I am dazzled by the newness of it all, the flashy, fast-moving technology. It’s quite impressive, I must admit. But I can only take so much of it before I have to retreat to the silence and calmness of my inner world.
I no longer have a desire to be entertained or constantly stimulated. Instead, I want to be alone with my thoughts and the information I choose to research. I liken all the technologically enhanced entertainment and convenience to eating triple chocolate cake that is too sweet, with so much flavor that it’s like eating an addictive drug disguised as food and engineered not to nourish but to trap. It’s veered so far from the subtle natural flavors, the brilliance in God’s design to compel us to eat just enough to be satisfied but not continue to eat after we are satisfied and even until will feel we are going to explode because our taste buds were overwhelmed by an enhanced flavor that enraptured them—the mind disconnected from the stomach and reality.
The flashing moving images on large computerized surfaces at the mall seemed like they were trying to overload my mind and shut it down. Even now as I write this, I see echoes in my mind’s eye of the multicolor quickly-changing images on screens, so that even though I wasn’t in a movie theater, I was constantly bombarded with movie-like images trying to grab my attention to sell me something, I guess. But instead of remembering what the images were trying to sell, I only have the bad aftertaste of overstimulation, that triple chocolate cake taste that won’t go away easily. I left the big city a week ago, but I still see the unnatural blur of red, blue, orange, yellow, pink, and purple lights as they now are shining and moving around in my head.
I recall the time I wasted when I was younger watching empty entertainment that didn’t teach me anything of value. It’s all a blur now, flashing images from cheap thrills that temporarily glutted my senses and stopped time so that I could eat that triple chocolate cake in an altered state of consciousness in which the only limit to what you could experience was death.