When I was a child, I needed a camera to take photos, I needed a CD player to listen to music, I needed a ruler to know the length of something . Each of them exists for one purpose. So we needed to switch our consciousness to go to the next thing without missing a beat. It helped us to decide whether we liked something or not rather than whether we could make something or not.

Now I need only one device like an iPhone to take photos, listen to music and measure. I realized that the feeling that I could do many thiings at once with my hands deprived me of aliveness or life force. Because everything starts to be treated as data. So the world changed from a sphere to pixels. It is like eating chicken soup in separate parts, like carrots first and chicken broth second. In that way, I don’t savor chicken soup in a harmonized way. It is the same as only seeing broken up pixels instead of seeing one picture.

One day I determined to graduate from the pixelated world. For example, I will listen to music as music not data. I want to enjoy music as a whole not as disassembled parts. At least when I was a child, many musicians paid attention to not only to the music but also to the jacket or liner. So I could imagine its music from the liner notes and its work consistently had a clear intention. And feeling the musician’s intention sometimes helped me to go forward. But only streaming digitized music cannot make it.

So I bought a CD player and stopped copying music from a CD to iTunes. Each time I listen to music, I feel like bowing to that musician. They poured their passion into the music, so it is worth bowing to. This also helps me to take back dignity in my whole life. I received conveniences from data, but it is not my future, it is my past.

初出:2019年1月14日