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Have we human reached our maximum bandwidth capacity? Yes, it seems

Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés maintains, and with good reason, that we humans have renounced (abdicated, I would say) our responsibility to be and become better. In other words, we have renounced to the future, or, if you prefer, we no longer seek to expand our consciousness or our experiences.

Having given up being better and precisely because of having done so, the future has become a perpetual repetition of the present (that is, a constant nightmare and punishment) or a grim apocalypse that can only be avoided by returning to the past. In this way, "salvation", however it is understood, is no longer connected with a future hope.

In other words, we live without living, trapped in an uncertain present that, by constantly changing, never changes, longing for a past to which we will never return no matter how hard we try and unable to access a future that, regardless, it presents itself as threatening and destructive.

In a few words: we are zombies, the living dead who roam the world disconnected from the world, walking without going anywhere, looking for what they cannot find, irrational and incorrigible, without consciousness of their own or of others. 

We are, as Garcés says, posthumous. We abandoned the narrative of history as constant progress, but with nothing to replace it. No history and no future for us. 

But how and why have we reached that sorry state in which neither the future of the planet nor the future of humanity moves us enough to assume or resume our responsibility of being better? How and why do we prefer to live in a world of fantasy, fiction, and trivia rather than living in a world of responsible adult humans?

One possible answer, which has been offered hundreds of times over the past two decades, is that humans have surpassed our ability to process stimuli, data, and information. The "bandwith" of human perception has limits and we have exceeded them, overwhelming both our brain and our mind, now unable to understand the world and reality.

Many experts claim that modern technology and specifically smartphones (in fact, portable microcomputers) are responsible for having pushed us to the limits of our ability to process data because we now literally have more information in our hands than we need or that we can access.

It could be said that technology has trapped (almost) all of us within an immense virtual enclosure similar to those well-known casinos in Las Vegas where the senses are constantly stimulated to the maximum, to the point that people lose track of place, day, and time.

Or, in other words, we are inside the Platonic cavern, although with more lights and with a better show. Also, physical chains were replaced by wireless connections. But the result is the same: we have so zombified and infantilized ourselves that we have forgotten who we are or can be.

As Garcés says, the answer is to reactivate our critical thinking, a challenging, difficult task in today's world.

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