We're virtually screwed.

We're virtually enslaved. And we're virtually dead. But let me explain what these thoughts are, what they mean and what they ought to express.

I was never happy, but sad is not a word I would've used back then, or today. It's more complex than, let's say, just overall existence, that sense of being conscious but not active in our own lives, being a watcher, having a part, but not being the main character, or at least, not from a blockbuster. I wouldn't consider myself depressed though, not even today, when the level of cynicism has taken so much of my personality that I dare another adjective to take its place. So, I prefer to say that I was enough lysergic to overcome the struggle of living, but enough conscious to be able to identify the little spaces where I had to fill in with action.

However, when I grew up, there was a dangerous lack of information that otherwise could've helped so many people that didn't consume data as much as they do now, where against mainstream ignorance there wasn't any mainstream counter-argument, or at least any arguably safe space where people could consider themselves contained with what they were going through. And ironically, that absence made people strong, proportionally to how young they were when they first had contact with the nihilism concept of existence.

We all know what happened after that: the 2000s rushed over us, the 2010s stepped on our heads, and maybe confusing us with a strong well-formed ground, built a shaky ass cracked platform that wouldn't resist even a friendly blow - but it did. Because data was there. The information and its ability to spread itself took control of the world (finally), and it helped to fill the blank spaces with promises of knowledge, although it underestimated the ability of humans to fuck it up. People were overwhelmed with the amount of digits and passwords and slangs they had to learn, that eventually, when data grew faster and bigger than anything humans could ever process, they just gave up to machines, to things that could contain bytes, while they were fighting to contain their emotions. That's when the help centers for every single experience gained power. Countless of different so-called well-being help centers appeared to tell people what they were struggling with, from raw harsh clinic depression to shopping-mall anxiety. It was a mess that could've been avoid at some point (and I won't even try to materialize that), but not fully and/or realistically speaking. So, depression became a trend, as well as other mental health illnesses, but not as it should have long ago. It was this waterfall of bad decision over uncontrollable and unfiltered information that screwed it, and for a lot of people it's not even something they could get diagnosed with, clinically, but instead it became a sort of scape from harsh situations, or unwanted ones.

This is what mental illness had been reduced to: a trend, that is gradually and slowly crossing its peak towards the curve of its journey's cycle, maybe looking at the edge of the horizon and seeing afar, with fear, its end. And by no means this will be the end of the discussion, it shouldn't be, never. But it really seems to be going through just a phase, wearing now a dark lipstick, being no more than a Balenciaga bag with a print that no one will use or remember in the years to come. It's the power that humans have to degrade their suffering, transform it into something that they can use to prove their point, work as an excuse and a valid reason at the same time, and generate the greatest confusion in the meanwhile. But although there are ways to persist on treating the real issues, to keep talking about them without distort the purpose of doing that, there is a damnation factor that wasn't there before: data is so everywhere that's is more there than us. It represents us more than ourselves, and therefore, we are getting tired of maintaining our existence over our data, while at least, we should be able to make them complement each other.

This is our virtual damnation, our death and our enslavery. We don't belong to ourselves anymore, not because we gave up to robots, and machines, and bytes, but because we depend on them to tell us what we need to feel, what we're going though, how we define our issues, and all of that is part of this trend cycle that couldn't be more evidently measured by the data holders we feed.

And this is the smallest of our questions, because it remains unanswered, it remains unsolved. And we're giving up to the cycle, we're letting it become unbreakable, and we're letting it grow stronger every time. This is time for a new human, one that should be able to rule its mind.