Where do we begin?
Talking about social media feels like a cool breeze against your ass after a morning dump. That, and the usual reminder: you forgot to wash your hands again.
If social media were a country it would be some combination of ancient Greece and 1940’s Germany. The questions mankind would ask and the creative freedom available to us would never be the same again, but no one would’ve thought this would also come at new levels of human monstrosity.
Social media is to the current generation what baby boomer parents are to their children. If you screw up your life, you blame it on them. But according to the latest update, the parents are doing just fine and you are still leeching off them.
I love to hate on social media as much as the next hypocrite, and I have (because the breeze feels good) but there’s a point at which this behavior becomes as inflaming as social media itself.
And we may have reached that point.
My generation grew up in one of the most peaceful times in human history and the closest we came to dystopia was Jurassic Park. We know a thing or two about having our needs met without working for them, thanks again, mum and dad. And we learned the meaning of friendship from a sitcom where the people who played friends need, for some godforsaken reason, 17 freaking years to make one reunion episode. That’s the kind of relationship you share with the girl you dated for three days. And those are my problems. Could I be any more full of shit?
No one gave us a catastrophe. We needed a scapegoat real bad. Enter social media with its youthful lusty passion to bring us closer. It was all right at the start because the users were a bunch of harmless humanoids looking to get laid. Or as they are more commonly known, geeks. And social media companies were like, Nah humanity sucks far deeper than this. And they dug in. And not even they were prepared for what they would find. Rage. Revolution. And Righteousness. The faintest sense of Responsibility, now rubble. Rrrr.
Even alcoholics have a better sense of responsibility. They begin to work on themselves first. Imagine, if instead, they made a documentary on fermentation techniques and how the companies manufacturing alcohol use these techniques to make their alcohol taste better (who does that?) which is what renders the alcoholics totally helpless in the first place which is great for them (the alcoholics) because everyone will finally believe the divorce wasn’t their fault. And now imagine airing this documentary on vapes.com.
Having nothing worthy confronting us meant we became addicted to our thoughts. Loving yourself and hating yourself are both outcomes of this doubling down. A shitty climax and anti-climax.
So with no one to tell us what to do, we went all in. This was our sanity’s coup de grace. Not because of the algorithms as much as the aloneness. We gave our lives away to a question that would make Greek philosophers ask for an extra serving of hemlock:
“How can I make everything about ME?”
Social media didn’t cause loneliness. Our loneliness caused Social Media.
As pithy as that sounds, anxiety, depression, and loneliness can’t be dismissed like the people who feel them. But it’s equally irresponsible to blame social media and just walk the eff away from all this. Because, and if you still don’t get this you may possibly be brain dead, social media is us. It’s not the logo on your sneakers stitched together by a ten-year-old which you can continue to ignore.
We led to this. It’s very convenient to shit on the morality of the people who, let’s not forget, are as human as – and most often, much smarter, kinder, and thoughtful than – you are but who obviously are as forgetful about what humanity does to those who try to bring it together. It executes them, just FYI.
And how are we paying for our sins? Through wars, divisions, and oppression. Or as it is known in the first world, work.
So let’s not screw this up one more time. We got distracted for a bit there and if anything, social media (unintentionally) showed us what it means to hoard love. But the thing with love is you can start over. It’s what everybody hit by this shitstorm need. And if we’ve learned anything at all, and if we really want things to change this time around, we need to start over, together.
Meditations 