Unlike most people, I am not ashamed to say that I was once a social media addict. It used to be so bad that the first thing I did when I woke up was update my Twitter feed then I realised that I was living an unreal reality.
Waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom was the most exciting thing because it meant that I had an excuse to check on it. “I was up already,” I’d reason. Then reality hit me when I realised I was busy “unfollowing” and “blocking” people in my real life. People I actually knew. If someone did as much as not reply my text message or reply it late the first thing I’d think would be I’m unfollowing and blocking him or her from my life – this I did by deleting their number from my phone and ignoring them completely.
Then came the problems of hustling for their numbers when they were now pissed at me. It was stressful and as if that was not bad enough I started craving likes even in real life situations. I’d say the most socially acceptable thing hoping someone would applaud me. I lived for the applause. There are many apologies in today’s media than I have ever witnessed in my time in this life. People are apologising for saying the most sensible things.
Recently Russell Crowe had to apologise for suggesting older women start looking for roles more age appropriate instead of craving the same roles they played 20 years earlier. Meryl Streep accepted her situation earlier than most and she has been getting roles forever. The same can be said about Diane Keaton. So after saying this some women activists started making noise and he had to apologise for making sense.
Come on guys. Had one influential person like Nicki Minaj said he had made sense the whole social media world would have jumped in and supported him and talked about how wise he was. People are bashing other people for saying the same exact things we say in the privacy of our living rooms. So things took a wrong turn for me when I realised that I was slowly losing touch with myself even in real conversations. When you lose yourself you become frightened to be yourself. Then there was the fear of missing out. But 2 months outside the Twitter-sphere, I stopped caring about the smallest things that happen on the other side of the world. It did not matter that some rappers were fighting in a club. I also stopped caring about how outraged some animal lovers were about how a dog was made to sleep outside in his dog-house instead of sleeping on the bed with his owner.
That’s how ridiculous these activists have become. Everything can be defended. Even the sickest crimes can be defended or explained away considering you have enough outraged people on social media or even enough sympathetic people. And sympathetic people are the most vocal because they’ll be talking from a place where they’ll be feeling justified and angelic for “feeling for another person,” no matter how guilty he or she is. But life and conversations are much nicer in real life because you get to witness facial expressions not someone’s best selfie which expects say can be made better by the light and the angle of the camera.
