It’s runaway train and the price of the ticket is not worth the ride.
The reality is there is no reality. Within our current world it’s exceptionally difficult to recognize something real, or fake. Especially online. For items you can hold in your hand we have systems in place to search out fakes.
However online? We can not trust anything. Is it live or is it memorex? Is the website you are making a purchase from, actually the correct site, or a phishing site? Is the company you are dealing with actually a bonafide operation or someone operating out of an overseas mail box?
A lot of times, even my Photography is suspect by laymen. They actually have no idea of the work I put into creating my image. I see hundreds of fake Ai images online everyday where people actually think what is represented is reality, and it’s actually totally fake.
On a lot of social networking sites you can find people peddling a program where you can create 180 videos in minutes. This trend is actually fed by the So-So networking sites themselves. Online is a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week environment.
“We” freely give up our information online in the name of “sharing,” while the online entity grabs that information, catalogs it, and then serves that information up to others for a fee! Yes, in some cases they will share those fees with the content creators…
However! The pressure to keep your offerings coming, in order to keep pace with the algorithm’s so that your content is seen, is totally immense! You are planted in front of your computer, or your mobile computer the smart phone, 24/7. So you really have no life. Also they change how much you are to be paid for that content all the time, with out notice!
Enter the world of Ai. Now I can push a button and generate tons of content! Still in the hopes my content will be seen… who really cares if that content is “fake?”
Well Personally I do, but I’m “wrong.” More people click on fake news and fake offers than they do on reality. I’m not “Joe Popular” online and I’m ok with that! At least I’m real. I was raised with principles. I support principles. Thoreau said it best…. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
For someone like me, who is into principles this new “reality” is pretty hard to take. Everything I’ve ever been taught or inspired to uphold is out the window.
It’s not supposed to be about what you have monetarily but inside. However… if you are surrounded by falsehoods, soon that is all you have inside. So?… when being constantly bombarded by negativity it is difficult to absorb positivity. Thoreau’s solution was to move to Walden pond and “live deliberately in nature.”
My solution, especially when it gets hot, is to head for the country and a simpler environment. I’ll be working more diligently to adopt this practice all the time now, not just for the summer. Within that simpler environment my only care “news wise” is where is the fire and what’s the weather?
What Would You Do?
If all of a sudden you were handed a death sentence? We are all very aware we are not going to live for ever… however now the Doctor says your days are numbered. Now your mortality hits you in the face! Would you want truth? Or is some numbnuts with a huge following throwing fake information out there with Ai, ok with you?
How would you spend your days now? Would you spend it with things adding to? Or taking away?
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” “Things do not change; we change.” “All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”
All of the quotes above are by Henry David Thoreau, who passed away in 1862 at the age of 44, from complications of Tuberculosis. This was during the height of the Civil War. Robert Frost said of Thoreau… “in one book … he surpasses everything we have had in America.”
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” “The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.” “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” “Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, ‘I will simply be.” “Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare”
Once again all of the above are quotes by Henry David Thoreau. A genius of a man!… A poet? No… but a very powerful writer!
I Have Become My Grand Parents
I was never lucky enough to meet my Grandfather on my Dads side. But I remember well, being taught my entire life, to revere our elders! Now? Somehow the generation that was taught that, forgot to pay it forward. The youth of today pretty much disdain the Boomer Generation.
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” ~Thoreau
Written in the 1800’s! Yet still very true today. I look at all the new things coming and wonder, really? I survived the new things my grand parents warned of… but did I really? Or did I simply make do? What will my Son do? I hope he becomes the rare thinker.
My last post was about adding to or taking away. I’ve been thinking a lot about that reality. I’ve chosen to add too, much more than have things taken away from me. I’ve made decisions about the wise use of my time. I cannot buy any more time!
I am trying hard to stand up more to live, than to sit down to write… I am concentrating more on absorbing the world around me. Thoreau also said “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
With my photography this is also something that has driven me. What did I see? Did others see what I saw? More importantly, did they feel what I felt? Another Thoreau quote… ” Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.” My Yoda! Those have to be the most powerful eleven words ever written!
So what’s your dream? Are you living it? Are you trying to live it? Have you truly envisioned what that dream is? Is that dream possible? Does your dream involve a fake world? Will you allow fraud, falsification, and deception to rule your dream environment?
If we keep giving attention to what is fake we all lose…
All of my images this post are from my travels and they are iPhone shots… I left Vegas on April 13th and headed for the Oregon Coast. I have not had time to edit any images from my big boy camera yet. Just today I finished a PhotoSafari with four of the coolest folks I know.
This Months Feature Photographer Is Richard Haire
Richard is totally real! Richard is also one of my Campfire Group Members. A very fine man, Richard spent 42 years working in management for Safeway. Anyone that has ever been in management knows your primary job is managing people. This is NOT easy! Richard is married to a very fine lady that he has been devoted to, for thirty five years!
Richards second devotion is Photography. He works at it constantly! Photography is his passion. I’ve been told that when he’s truly involved in the digital darkroom, he is impervious to other surroundings. Richard is deep. Richard is real. Richard has a wonderful sense of humor. Richard is a big man at 6′ 5″… but he is even bigger inside. Someday when I grow up I’d love to be more like Richard…
Richard’s favorite environment is the Ocean. All of his Photography shows a passion for the artistic side over the technical, which I personally really admire. Another trait I admire is that Richards Photography is a work in progress and he is definitely not done yet.
Here is a very small sampling of his work…
Thanks for being here!
