The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an antiaging moisturizer? You make someone worry about aging. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business. Yet we have no other world to live in.
I listened to a podcast last week for the first time in my life. My friend sent me an episode (is that what they’re called?) of a Joe Rogan one where his guest speaker was Johann Hari, an author there to discuss his book, “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.” I haven’t read the book, and he covered a lot of things, but one that really stuck out to me was the idea of social satisfaction. So I’m gonna take that, run with what Haig said, and spin it in a way that meshes it all together.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard things like “I wish you had an Instagram so I could tag you in stuff”, “Well, it was on Facebook”, “Make sure you Snap me!”, and let’s not forget the classic “Let me see the ring!”. Even worse, people will start conversations with me based on things they ASSUME I’ve seen in the last 4 hours because it’s on social media, TV, or the news. A lot of my friends do this, and I’m not singling anyone out, but it brings me to a perfect point. And yea, there’s absolutely times I want to stab ALL OF YOU for doing it.
This isn’t breaking news, but we, as a society, have grown to revolve entirely around social media. This includes TV, radio, news, etc., because it all ends up on Facebook or Twitter anyways, right? The quality of a person becomes based on how many followers they have, how good a filter can make them look, and you’re not cool if you’re not Snapchatting every moment of your life. We care about everyone else’s business but our own. And we expect that of other people. No wonder depression and anxiety is becoming “an epidemic”.
I can’t say I’m entirely removed from it. While “Everything’s okay in moderation”, there’s nothing moderate about the amount of time, energy, and focus people place on things that should bare no relevance into their own lives. The saddest part is that there’s no way to remove ourselves from it and still feel a sense of belonging.
I feel completely out of the loop because I have no idea who went home on The Bachelor last night, who the awesome gay Olympian dude is that “everyone’s in love with”, I’m not ecstatic that the new Kardashian is named Chicago, I haven’t seen “that one video” that’s trending on Twitter, I don’t care what Beyoncé said about Rihanna, and I have no idea which politician said what about whatever it is they were debating. Cause I don’t give a fuckkkkkkk. Why would I? The TV relationship’s not gonna last more than 4 months, Chicago is far from being the last Kardashian baby, and if we go to war, I’ll find out when I start hearing shit go off.
I learned a long time about how much damage social media (not to mention, the news) does mentally, but also that it’s impossible to change anyone but myself. One of the things Hari and Rogan talked about was the idea that changing the way society works as a whole is impossible because it’s “too grand”. Hari pointed out something along the lines that, while true, if you had told someone 75 years ago that gay marriage would be legal and our president would be black, NO ONE would have believed him. I won’t go there because I’m not a Democrat in any sense of the word, but I’d like to think that it’s possible to stop humanity before we get any worse. It would be awesome to get on a train and see people reading or writing instead of scrolling and tagging.
Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change. As any Buddhist would tell you, an overattachment to material things will lead only to more suffering.