Your Wallpaper is Cursed
In which meaning is diminished
Hands up if your wallpaper is a scenic landscape, an ethereal vista overlooking mountains and rivers.
Hands up if your wallpaper is your loved ones — your significant other, your newborn sugarcube, that shot of the guys lining up with arms all over one another’s shoulders.
Hands up if your wallpaper is a quote, one of your favourites, to tell you that everything is okay, to motivate you, to remind you of what you truly believe.
Many of us put what we treasure as the wallpaper on our phones — homescreens and lockscreens — computers, and anything with a surface that casts an image. We think that by doing so we will be seeing it daily and it would hopefully bring a smile to our faces.
Yeah, sure, the first few days when the wallpaper is up you would stare at your screen for a few seconds more — perhaps to reminisce a frosty memory, or to dream a desired fantasy, or just to smile. But as days turn to weeks and weeks turn to months, you almost take no notice of whatever is on the background.
Just look around your house, you probably have stuff hanging off your walls or displayed on the tables and shelves. How often have you truly taken the time to just pause and just look at all these photos and posters that has surrounded you for years?
We have the things we love put up in front of our faces but hidden in plain sight.
I’m typing now as this image sits behind my window, freckled — or littered, rather — by all my folders and applications on my desktop.
Every time I turn on my computer, I immediately look at the Google Chrome icon or my folders and rattle away at my keyboard, completely oblivious to that amazing view I see before me.
Every time I grab my phone, I turn it on and swipe to unlock, then go about clicking Facebook or Whatsapp, not giving my wallpaper a single thought.
It’s not just because this is the age of desensitization, precipitated by the proliferation of content competing for your attention — these sinister things that gnaw at your already overwhelmed brain.
It’s about who we are. We are humans, masters of adaptation. Anything new can be automatic to us in a matter of days.
Our brains are built to ignore the constant things in our lives so we can deal with the ever-changing.
Don’t you just think it is such a tragedy that when we put the things we value most on our wallpapers, we are conditioning ourselves to ignore them, to become indifferent about their magnificence? All this, eroded by nothing but the laziness of our brains to process it?
We desire meaning and purpose in life and yet we are the ones that are flipping the switch to make the meaningful meaningless.
This is the reason why I started putting random things that just look nice as a wallpaper and not attach meaning to them.
This is similar to why you don’t put your favourite song as your alarm or ringtone, because eventually you will grow used to it and it just become any other sound — a Pavlovian response to stimulus. And in the case of alarms, you’ll probably hate it by the third day.
I admit, it’s really tempting to put your favourite song as a ringtone or a meaningful picture as your wallpaper. We all want to be constantly reminded of what makes us happy and hopeful, but plastering it somewhere you will see it all the time is not the way to do it.
True meaning comes from within — your mind, your heart. You don’t switch on your phone to find it. You draw it from within the depths of yourself and appreciate it, act upon it.
That’s what meaning is. It’s a subtext — hidden, masked — and those who finds it gets it.