After Thanksgiving, I watched a documentary that ultimately set me at odds with December’s frenzied pace. For me, the month has evolved from a time of calm reflection into a month of haves and wants.
The new National Geographic documentary “Tsunami: Race Against Time” hit me hard and gave me the jolt to ask myself how to get off the consumer train.
Southeast Asia has my heart; my family and I lived in Asia beginning in the early 2000s. Our children were little then, and we established a set of holiday traditions that meant Christmas in Bangkok with minimal gifts and maximum adventures. The Thais are beautiful people, welcoming and gracious. The Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and resulting tsunami in the Indian Ocean wrecked countless lives. It killed nearly a quarter of a million people in that region 20 years ago, including thousands of Thais and tourists.
The documentary itself is spellbinding. The viewer becomes a participant in the unbelievable scenery and chaotic devastation the giant waves caused in the early hours of the day after Christmas.
The mind-blowing experience of seeing the water washing away beachgoers, buildings, and even a train was extra alarming as I watched the four-part series on a streaming platform that allows commercials.
Viewing the gut-wrenching tragedy was flat-out jarring because of the advertising breaks. The frequent ads for mobile phones, fast-food restaurants, and shoes horrifyingly broke up the documentary every few minutes: T-Mobile, Chick-fil-A, and DSW in between actual human misery.
The relentless phone ads foreshadow coming aspects of the tragedy just before smartphones became omnipresent. Ironically, frantic scientists in the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu were tracking the earthquake and tsunami in real-time and struggled as they had few options to warn the millions of people who dotted Asian coastlines and were exposed and vulnerable to the massive waves.
Today’s ads show an American life that seems superficial, too loud, too brightly lit, and primed for consumption compared to 20 years ago. Toggling between the ads and the documentary left me thinking about how to revise my forecast. I don’t want to be an extreme version of humankind; many technological advancements are going somewhere scary where we all require experiences and stuff on demand catered precisely to our highly refined sense of personal algorithms.
I know lots of good comes from advancements in technology, including ways to help warn about natural disasters like potential future tsunamis, which is priceless. What is not good is the louder, self-focused lives presently occupied.
I will do better in 2025. I will think more about how I spend my time, effort, and money and try to pay back; I don’t want to be that extreme version of humans that played out in those commercials. Do you?
