In this era of social media, I feel like there is way too much we do to impress other people. We make things more grandiose and we pretend to be cocky and better than other people and it's just...disheartening. We post Facebook status' and tweets every five minutes about every single thing we do and think, and isn't it exhausting? I couldn't believe more that all of the small things you do and believe are more important than anything, but doesn't the line start to blur between what matters and what we do to try and make people envy us? Why does this generation need so much validation from others? It just puts a pit in my stomach, because I feed into it. I feed into the lie that others can validate me. That if someone else think I'm smart or pretty or accomplished than it's more true than if I think it. I am good at appreciating minuscule things about my life that I know no one else could, but at the same time, I still feed into the presence of others around me. If only it were easy enough to live without giving a fuck about what anyone thinks of us. I don't know how many times I've heard a young person say that since we discovered the internet, but I think people say it, and keep saying it, and it takes so much longer to register than they think. We think that if we declare it, it's true. That nothing and no one can touch us, that nothing we do is impacted by other people. That we are so enlightened to be able to do that.
It seems as though were better at dealing with the bad opinions than the good ones. If we hear someone say that were a bitch or an idiot or a piece of shit, we can write them off because they don't know us well enough to be able to say that. But we take praise easily. No matter how well a person knows us, we will take their praise with open arms and think it holds value. It's a positive way to take things, but at the same time, it's just deluded. It's fucked up how easily we can construe things to make them what we want to hear and feel.
I just feel like we've fallen into a pattern of looking in all of the wrong places for self worth. And it isn't just shallow bragging or fake persona's, it's the hard stuff too. It's our demons. We put them on display, because for a fleeting moment, we think someone will help us. If we say how overwhelmed we are or how much we hate our lives, we think that someone will try to save us. That someone will reach out and say something that will strike a chord or just make us feel better. Unfortunately, all of this has become so common, that most people don't bat an eye at it. We are good at saying what is real and what is not. We are good at telling ourselves, we are good at judging others. We are good at defining a person by a decision they make, or a couple of decisions they make, and we are good at believing the same things. This is everywhere. It's everywhere and we don't want to do anything about it, because at this point it's so commonplace. We don't know who's looking for sympathy or overreacting, because everything is so blurred and impossible to read. And it sucks that we assume that people don't have serious issues. It sucks that we don't allow ourselves to believe that we have serious issues. It isn't fair that we are inclined to treat everything as a joke, as something to make fun of. Pain is pain. No one deals with it in the same way. Everyone just wants help and love and to feel like they're going to be okay. There is no "correct" way to ask for help. Some ways are better than others, but it's hard to be rational when your emotions feel everything but. This is what we do, we write off pain. We don't allow things to be serious. We think everyone is responsible for pulling themselves in deeper and deeper. And in return, we allow ourselves to believe the same. It isn't fair to anyone.
It bothers me that we are burying real, and important things in a pile of bullshit. We are ruining all of the genuine inside of us and leaving it to be judged and validated by everyone else but ourselves. Everyone writes it off for fun and entertainment, but it's more than that. We invest a lot of ourselves in it, and we don't even realize it. We let our emotions and our lives be affected by "likes". I just hate it all, and I don't fully understand why I hate it so much. It's just that people that I have to be surrounded by and sit in classrooms with and make relationships with, can all be really full of shit at times. We are so good at pretending were confident and our lives are great and I'm tired of it. It is exhausting to observe. Conversations are filled with lies and fake enthusiasm and words aren't sacred anymore. We don't use them correctly. And i'm so tired of everyone pretending to know what the fuck they're doing, because no one knows what the fuck they're doing. Stop pretending you have it all figured out. It isn't that easy.
This is one of my "I've lost faith in my generation rants.". But my faith does come back. Sometimes ideas build up in my mind and it's hard to just be optimistic and say that everyone is grand and on the right path. Sometimes people suck and things suck and it just needs to be said that they do. I'm not above any of this, but it bothers me. It'll bother me less and less eventually because I'll slowly absorb the realization that everyone else's bullshit doesn't matter. I have my own bullshit.
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