Are We Becoming Forgettable?

I saw Bob Ross on a candy tin at the store today.

Bob Ross was a man who showed up genuinely with a canvas every day.

Happy little trees and a half hour of your time.

My grandmother liked watching him when I was a kid. She painted along with him on his PBS show, and kept VCR tapes too. I have a couple of her paintings.

But while Americans fell in love with the story they saw, they didn’t know anything about the man Bob Ross himself.

They made him into a meme and turned him into a snack.
In more ways than one.

And I suppose it’s a kind of afterlife.

But one where the person is removed.

It made me think about our fast digital lives today.

How we gobble up social media snacks and exist in a life with little texture at all.

So little ponder and pause that, in fact, we barely remember the information that crosses our minds.

Our brains don’t even rank what we see as important enough to stick around in long-term storage.

I wonder, as we live our lives tired and exhausted, overworked and stuck in digital reality, craving a moment of something, if we’re missing out on so much texture of living.

If we’re becoming forgettable.

I think about my late husband, John, and how he was a force of nature.

How he lived his life with texture and character.

How no one on earth who ever knew him would ever describe John D. Chambers as forgettable. He was so, in fact, NOT that.

I think about the rich threads we wove together as creators, and how I feel that being a Creator is the very heart and nature of what it means to be Human.

And somehow–now–John has become a measure for me. Of living life all in, with texture and distinction.

And yet, this world, drunk on sameness and digital snacks, rolls on.
The world is poorer and doesn’t know it.

Two nights ago, I wrote that I often think about what our descendants will ask of us 2000 years from now.

We look to the past, and legends and myths and religions and histories and stories abound.

Where humans have left their fingerprints behind and told us about their weavings.

But in the face of a sweater-shaped Bob Ross candy tin, I find myself staring at a strange absurdity.

And instead I wonder: will descendants 2000 years from now wonder if there really ever was a honey badger and why it didn’t give a shit?

What will be known from the fragments we leave behind?

When we die, will we become flattened memes and marketing pieces that benefit silent pockets?

How much of our own lives will we remember when we are old?

What textures will we have to hold onto when the stresses of the world flatten us out?

Will we say we lived our lives well and remember the breath of possibility?