Aren’t you glad you did not grow up in the age of social media?
Nowadays, the likelihood of a stranger recording you doing something that is likely to draw criticism or ridicule is high.
What you need to know:
- Nowadays, social media is where many of us first run to when we suffer a broken heart or when something goes wrong in our lives.
- And then you wake up in the morning and realise what a blunder you made, but by then, the video showing your meltdown will have done rounds.
A couple of friends and I were having a conversation the other day, where we unanimously agreed that we are glad we did not grow up in the age of social media. We were especially relieved that the utterly foolish things we did in our youth are not immortalised somewhere, where they can be unearthed at will and displayed for the world to see, simply because we did not have phones and the other assortment of gadgets at our disposal today.
Those days, before the internet took over, if you were inconsolable because your boyfriend or girlfriend left you for someone better, you either found a way to patch up your broken heart in private, cried yourself to sleep, or sought a close friend and poured out your grief to them. I’d imagine that this was the same scenario when married couples were going through an especially difficult spell, separated or divorced.
Nowadays, social media is where many of us first run to when we suffer a broken heart or when something goes wrong in our lives. In that raw state of hurt when you’re most vulnerable, you unburden ourselves, spew the abuses you think the person who hurt you deserves, and then finally, mercifully, fall asleep. And then you wake up in the morning and realise what a blunder you made, but by then, the video showing your meltdown will have done rounds, and deleting it from your page will be an exercise in futility.
For many, at least for me, clarity usually comes in the morning after a good night’s sleep, and in many cases, the experience I thought marked the end of life as I knew it doesn’t seem so bad after all. Whichever way you look at it, outbursts are never pretty, and many end up regretting what they bare on social media in that moment of bitterness or deep hurt.
‘Unsieved’ thoughts on social media
The chronology is almost always the same. You post your ‘unsieved’ thoughts on your social media platforms, having given in to the host of emotions assailing you, and when you wake up the following day, the enormity of what you said or wrote hits you and you wish you had slept over it.
Another advantage of having grown up in the ‘Stone Age’ period is that one does not feel compelled to record everything, which allows you to live in the moment, to fully enjoy what is before you with your eyes, rather than through the camera phone. Those days, there was no pressure to live up to a certain image, since we did not have social media pages to update. And so when a meal was placed before us, we went ahead and enjoyed it, rather than unleashing phones to take the perfect picture for social media.
And when you went somewhere and overindulged or did something embarrassing in that moment of excitement, you were secure in the knowledge that your mother or father would never find out about it because a friend or a stranger was not recording you. What happened in Vegas remained in Vegas, as they say. And because of that, our folly during our youth is dead and buried, and will remain that way.
Nowadays, the likelihood of a stranger recording you doing something that is likely to draw criticism or ridicule is high, which places undue pressure on how we behave in public. The internet has presented us with numerous opportunities, but it also robbed our lives of certain qualities.