A Day In Our Own Augmented Reality
In which he is often me, and also, sometimes you?
Humans are creatures of routine, and he was no different. Routines can be simple, and they can be complex. In his case, they were both. For this man had to augment his plain reality with embellishments. After all, simplicity is another excuse for laziness, and laziness is not to be tolerated in an age of advancement and ambition such as this.
His morning routine was his favorite. He woke with the sun, and also his smartphone alarm, which reminded him of the exact time that the sun indeed rose that day. He rubbed his eyes while checking his phone for notifications he missed the night before. Nothing important it seems. It was always worth checking.
This was his favorite time of day. His mornings were quiet and peaceful, albeit too quiet, so he had to do something about it. While getting ready for the dog’s morning walk, he tuned into a podcast episode that released the day before. What it was about didn’t matter. It had to tweak his quiet morning and turn it into something more helpful, more productive. In the five minutes since he got up, he could feel that he was wasting his day. But with this informative audio playing in his ear, now he was really doing something. He noticed his dog patiently staring at him beside the door. She had other priorities, and he obliged her, eventually.
He walked the dog, cooked breakfast, took a shower and set up his computer for work, and in that time he had learned about last night’s basketball scores, the next big fitness trend, the upcoming election and the affordable housing crisis. None of those things got the attention they deserved, but at least he was aware of them as he logged in for work that day. Everything up to now felt like time well spent.
Work was simple for him as well. Not as simple as his beloved morning routine, but it was easier than most people’s work. This was a perfect excuse to augment his reality a little more. Thanks to having multiple computer monitors, he kept up on news, listened to music, chatted with friends and even caught a documentary while he completed enough tasks to feel like he deserved his paycheck. The hours flew by.
When he needed a break from his “optimized” work routine, he would check his smartphone for a few minutes. Sometimes it would be 15 minutes. After all, who was counting? There was social media, which he hated, but had to check. There was the news, which was depressing, but he had to read about. There were hundreds of emails, which he often didn’t read, but he had to clean them out of his inbox. These breaks somehow made the day go by faster, which seemed like a benefit to him, although he wasn’t sure why.
Work came to an end, and at this point, he felt the need to flee his routine for a moment. He wanted to spend some “unoptimized” some time with others in our shared reality. After all, he had learned so much today. He surely deserved the break. Maybe he could share which celebrity was getting cancelled, or the new advancement by NASA, and he thinks he saw something about a war in Eastern Europe. We are social creatures after all, at least according to an NPR interview with a psychologist that he could recall.
He ate dinner with his wife, where they discussed their real-world and online insights of the day. They then retired to their couch, for they were mentally exhausted. His wife had recently gotten into a pop culture podcast, which apprized her of new content that they could enjoy for the evening. He liked some of them, but often lost interest. Luckily, his smartphone was always there to add a little flavor to his leisure time.
On some nights, they would instead go out, to meet with friends and family. In conversations, he shared what he was most interested in from his own particular flavor of reality, but nobody connected with it. This made him lonely. But he was also disappointed in the choices made by other people when it came to their augmented realities. Fantasy football? Boring, he would think. The weather? Predictable. Donald Trump? Been there, done that.
His parasocial conversations with podcast hosts were always more interesting than this. With so much information to access in the world, why couldn’t others be interested in exactly same stuff he was? It made little sense to him, but to each their own. Luckily, the night was ending, and he was ready for bed.
A childhood of listening to television to fall asleep made it difficult for him to be lulled to sleep in complete silence. So for one last enrichment of his daily routine, he found an internet video that was interesting, but not too interesting. After all, he didn’t want to lay awake all night. Getting a good night sleep is very important these days. He drifted off about 10 minutes into his YouTube documentary about nuclear power, and before he knew it, his smartphone was buzzing to remind him of the sunrise.
Time for another day. Maybe he’d skip the morning podcasts this time.
I tried something different here. Let me know what you think of it.