Mental Health Awareness Week 2021

This year's Mental Health Awareness Week (18-24 May) will be particularly tough on some.

Whilst the world reopens its doors to 'normality', many – out of no fault of their own - are being side-lined and forgotten.

Going from isolation to job rejection after job rejection from faceless algorithms dehumanises people.

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) campaigns urge us to take pity through kindness, but words alone rather than practical actions make those once with a sense of value, purpose, and respect, feel worthless. 

It's been a challenging year for everyone. Constantly stumbling over broken assurances has left some limping. 

Beyond happy shiny LinkedIn videos, preachers of disruption have inadvertently disrupted themselves.  Yet, must keep evangelising the new truth of digital redemption where the network is an inseparable part of life and work.

The pressure to keep pace is relentless.

In one year, technology has jumped ten.  

In the new network era, everything from a washing machine to a relationship can be easily replaced or upgraded, and that philosophy is driving the economy of the self. 

In trusting technology to replace, satiate and soothe, we explore just how far we can distance ourselves from pain.  And in software programmes becoming the first port of call to fix everything from grammar to schedules, they correct our efficacy, and we forget how to forgive human mistakes.

Truth has become virtual.  But virtual is eminently practical; it doesn't hide any sharp edges.

Algorithms send endless streams of rewarding life-affirming trinkets fished from a swirling pool of emptiness whenever someone asks Google how to think for them.

Just as human cashiers were replaced by robotic scanners warning of "unknown items in the checking-area," so bricks and mortar shops are retrograding into galleries of consumerism set in AstroTurf theme parks where plastic and metal, shaped by CAD/CAM software informed by qualitative data offers human experiences.  

Building a better future that levels up the manure weeping from the highest office is all that matters.

The economy takes star billing.  Business has become a spectacular Las Vegas revue. Ravenous for work, extras in the chorus line keep the set gleaming and punters swiping polished screens to buy the props.

Products get delivered in days or hours. Caprices are born in moments.

Out of sight of the glossy showroom set, a wearied zero-hour contractor carries the load in a perfectly formed, neatly folded box tracked by the latest kit of Middleware muscle.

In the pursuit of the self, goods, products, and services have become revered idealised imaginings stirred by a Wizard of Oz and realised by armies of credit cards marching down the yellow brick road.

We must aim to be happy team players pedalling nowhere on web-connected ￡1750 Pelotons that verify tribal virility and strength.

And as we clench in rhythm to the undulating muscles of an underpaid virtual Adonis, the screen constantly drip-drip-drip streams of soundbites and images of people with places to go, getting on with living - making those left spinning wheels or crushing candies, feel more isolated than during lockdown.

With so many looking for the break to live again, job algorithms can be picky.

This one didn't complete the form correctly.  That one didn't include the prerequisite keywords.  He is too old.  She is too experienced, too sharp, too blunt, too damaged, too tired, too keen… to be invited to the Great Unlocking Party.

Fumbling for the switch to turn off the endless audiobook of regret in their minds, people scratch and rip their bleeding cheeks.  

What was lost may never return, and what the network suggests should be theirs may never emerge.

So, they wipe their sticky wounds on t-shirts ordered on a 70% discount online store featuring a glowering woman who Boohoo's her crotch at the camera.

Libations to the God of Mainframes are offered.  Rose petals impregnated with the scent of secrets and the stench of sweaty nights alone are scattered liberally by network-nymphs across a path leading to a perfectly manicured Nirvana. 

Trooping in unison as a global community under one connected cloud of processed truth, people volunteer to become data points adding their bit (and byte) to a Tower of Babel where numbers don't just inform; but nurture, protect, and watch over all below.

Information is all, and data is all-powerful.

With a pocket window to the networked world, people judge their lives on other's distant narratives rather than close family and friends. 

In the networked era where all is expendable, being selfish is a right.  Being selfless is just cheating yourself out of a promised better deal. 

Armed with their Freedom App carried throughout the glorious gigabit-capable broadband network, people distract themselves by gazing at their mobile's Window of Comparison. It taunts them that they will never be good enough until and unless they become one with progress by sharing more and more thoughts to create the perfect human experience.  

So, we diligently swipe up the app and pull down the visor of virtual truth, to travel the planets from the hippocampus seat of dreams.

We are connected to an idyllic place that, in truth, burnt down long ago, lit by a spark to warm global hearts and bring together lost souls whose app- tuned smiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter prove they are living the dream in our perfectly sane and new normal world.

Unless that is, you would prefer an older kind of normality and sanity.