Turn and Look at the World

Lately, the theme of many of the summits I’ve attended and many of the sources I’ve read has come down to “caring” and why it matters. We live in an age in which robots become more human by the day and people become more robotic, as the philosopher Ioanna Kuçuradi so beautifully illustrated. In times when digitalization is spreading rapidly and people and their bonds are drifting apart just as quickly, bringing about our own end seems quite simple. It looks as though there won’t even be any need for evil to get inside the robots. What inspired these ideas fluttering through my mind was Sam Esmail’s film “Leave the World Behind.” The moment I saw the film’s title, I thought of Pinhani’s song “Dön Bak Dünyaya” (“Turn and Look at the World”). Then I concluded that both say the same thing from different angles. In the film, we watch a chain of events unfold that begins when a woman who says she hates people wants to take a vacation with her family, far from everyone. This feels very familiar, because in a place like Istanbul, with its constant traffic and crowds, we, too, often want to run away and get far from it all, and wherever we go, we try to escape from people. It feels very natural at first, but as we see the tension our weakening bonds create in our human-to-human interactions, we need to face this, friends. In the business world, the message I usually get is that this is a need for stronger networking, better leadership and, as a result, more productive work and, of course, profitable growth. But I think the matter is deeper and more serious than that. As a community of people who constantly think of their own interests, don’t care about those in front of them and don’t trust one another, we grow ever lonelier and are fading away. As the number of things we can do with a single click, without moving at all, keeps growing, we make gods of ourselves, but our swagger lasts only until the tiniest power outage. We freeze like a rabbit in the headlights. When we realize we need each other, we find the time to think twice. In moments like these, Pinhani’s song comes to our lips like hope, reminding us to turn around and check whether a friend is still there. It is the same message Sam Esmail delivers by placing the music from the series “Friends” at the end of his film: if there are friends who promise to be there for us, good. If not, who cares?