This scene addresses a lot of things in just over a minute, but it addresses them well. One facet of this rant I've been struggling with lately is Facebook. There's no way around it. Facebook is terrible.
I keep going on Facebook even though I hate it. A lot. Posts on Facebook fall into three basic categories: people portraying their lives as perfect, monetized articles (i.e. Buzzfeed, Salon, Upworthy, if that's still a thing, you get the picture), and, really a subcategory of the type I've just mentioned: political articles which become more extreme every day so you'll generate clicks for the people writing them. And I don't want to see any of it.
It's obvious why I don't want to see the Buzzfeed or political stuff. First of all, you aren't doing anything when you share a link to that crap that other than generating revenue for the site that posted it. You're not changing the world or helping those in need. You are earning money for people who design websites to generate the most clicks. And they are not paying you to do it. You are working for them and you are not being paid. It's that simple. They don't care about you. They don't care about "social justice" or the events happening in our country. They don't care about anything other than cash, and you're helping them out every time you share a link with an outrageous title designed to get people to click on it. So stop doing it. If you're going to post something political, use your damn words. Think for yourself and post it. As an example, and one that's apropos right now, if you want to talk about gun violence in this country, don't post a skewed graph from CNN. Think about the issue and actually say something about it. While I'm on the subject, if you DO agree with the political confrontations of that graph, let me extend a hearty fuck you to you and everyone who trashes me and my hobbies. I'm not a terrorist.
Which gets me to my second point: we are VERY confrontational on the Internet, particularly Facebook. I'm part of this problem in a big way. We enjoy getting angry, which is why we post things we KNOW people will disagree with. It's the same reason we also post things we know people will NOT disagree with: we want attention. We want to sound like we're saying something, and we want our lives to matter.
Only here's the problem: nothing on Facebook matters, and I think we all know that. Again, what people post that's original, and that's pretty rare these days, falls into two categories: trite and confrontational. Most of my bullshit is the latter, but I see a lot of the former too. This isn't about anyone in particular, and I'm sorry if one of these examples fits your description but frankly I don't CARE that you were at Disneyworld because Disney is trite and you're an adult who should have outgrown it. Same reason I don't care about whatever you have to say about Harry Potter. That's a children's series. You're in your mid-twenties. Grow up. I also don't care about your selfies. I don't care about your dining experiences. I don't care about the sports you watch.
Before you get too pissed, let me be the first to say that I imagine you don't care about my stuff either. Why would you? You really care what I have to say on Facebook about gaming, cars, shooting, politics, anything? Of course not. You shouldn't.
This isn't to say your life or my life or anyone's life is pointless, because it isn't. I've got some of the best friends in the friend-having business, and they put up with my bullshit pretty well in real life. But that's the key: in real life. What Facebook does is offers us the chance to portray ourselves in two ways: people who are so happy that they spend their time taking pictures of their meals or people who act edgy even though they aren't. That's what Facebook does. It allows you to pretend you're someone other than the very nuanced person you actually are. It allows you to design yourself. But you can't do that. Because you have flaws. And the problem is that we KNOW we have flaws. We don't believe the image we've created for ourselves because we're aware that we're lying. We do believe the images other people have created, though. I read recently that smartphones can worsen depression. Big surprise there. We spend all day looking at people's lives and they seem happy or important and we feel, in comparison, malcontent and small. Such and such has a nice car/house/vacation/boyfriend/girlfriend. Why don't I? Except guess what? That's not really the whole story.
The biggest thing I've learned in the past few years while struggling with some issues of my own is that no one's life is perfect and they're struggling with life too. Everyone has problems. But you're not really supposed to talk about that. You don't wake up in the middle of the night worrying that your life is going nowhere and you don't know quite what to do about it and post that on Facebook. That'd be weird. And because that'd be weird, we've lost our concept of normal and we're afraid to talk about it or rely on each other to get through it. Facebook has become real life. We don't talk to our friends about important things anymore, because we've lost sight of what's important by posting about big issues and talking about them on Facebook instead in an attempt to matter. And then those threads get buried under the latest thing to post about. It's transitory and doesn't lend itself to working through everyday problems like what the hell your purpose is in life. We don't think about things longer than it takes to "like" them. And then we wonder why we're all walking around depressed.
And here I am posting it all on Facebook. Because that's what we do.
Facebook is designed to offer feedback. As humans, we evolved to value feedback and approval from others. It's hardwired. Facebook was designed to simulate this, and it does, but it's not real or lasting, like the high a drug user gets and although not as addictive, the comparison isn't new or originally my own. Social media is an emergent technology and the negatives haven't been fully examined yet. I'm glad they're being examined now, but we've let it get out of control. Facebook runs our lives. It takes a lot of time and effort to extract yourself from it. I'm in the process of doing that, but I come back, I binge post five statuses in a day. We all do. It's a problem.
And I don't know what the solution is. We're all disconnected. We're seeing each other's lives in real time, but not the parts we care about and not the ugly parts that make the beautiful parts so great by comparison. Every single time I go on Facebook I find myself thinking when I log off that the site visit wasn't worth it. I get depressed, angry, annoyed, or all three far more often than I receive anything meaningful from it. Life's short. What's the point of feeling like that all the time? But I do it anyway, because hey, someone might have liked something I did or said, and then I can feel validated. It's nice to have that feedback, but what's the price and does it really mean anything?
These are questions I can't answer. This website is ingrained as deeply into my life as anyone else's to the point where I've just spent an hour writing about it instead of enjoying my night. I'm not going to spend more time formulating a solution. I'm going to post this and then forget about it until Monday. Because even if I just go make a cup of tea and watch the X-Files, or play Civilization, or read a magazine, I'm doing something. And it's fun. It doesn't even have to matter and I'll get more out of it than from finding out that you generated some clicks for Elite Daily or want to take my guns away again. If you want me to know that so much, tell me next time you see me. I'd rather hear it firsthand.
