You don’t automatically have more motivation when you have more free time, but when you get rolling you’re more likely to keep working and keep creating.
The longer you’re away from the internet the less you miss it. Doing my half-hour per day wasn’t as inviting as I thought it would be.
My guess is that that is so because when you have a time limit, you have to prioritize. And prioritizing probably means excluding. It feels safer and easier to just avoid things rather than being forced to make decisions like including/excluding.
Cooking counts as creating. Oooh yes.
Media including movies is a bitch.
Next time we should probably do no books and see what happens. Julia Cameron had something to say about that, didn’t she? In The Artist’s Way, the theme for one of the weeks was not read a single text for a week. Again, back then there was no net.
This thingie below would have never existed if we hadn’t sat down with Daphne and said “okay, let’s make a collage”.
And this would have never existed if we hadn’t said “okay, what should we do now? Let’s paint!” — “OK, what?” — “eachother!”
But motivation is still a limited resource that can be separated into qualitative levels: you can have good motivation, bad (negative?) motivation, pure motivation and unstoppable motivation. All the lack of distraction does is bring forward the standard kind of motivation that under ordinary circumstances simply isn’t strong enough to become a greater priority than habit and addiction (media/internet). I suppose the kind of motivation we’re after is the one that needs no media fasts to rear its elusive head; it just trumps anything and everything!
But then again, you have people like Frank Herbert who just wrote— motivation, inspiration, or no… How about it, qb?
For the past few weeks, I’ve been going to the Alsos almost every day, rotating the bodyweight fitness (push-ups, pull-ups, handstands, L-sits etc) with the running. And it feels grrreat! Daphne has been helping a lot with cooking healthy and nutritious vegetarian meals with lots of protein, not that I’m shy of the stoves, but I tend to cook the same three or four things, not experimenting unless in the mood, and with her in control we’ve been eating like vegetarian kings. It activates me and it’s bringing in some good skills to have. I don’t know if I would be doing it if I didn’t have all the free time I have now, but that’s beyond the point. Having a workout and exercise routine helps me bring some (illusion of) order to my disorganised life, and with some much appreciated visible results.
Nevertheless, what I haven’t been able to organise, discipline and harness at all– seriously, AT ALL — is my mind.
In June last year, apart from running 10k, I posted this little write-up I’m still proud of:
Trouble is, I didn’t go through with what I pledged I would do. As far as I can remember (which isn’t a lot, because, as typically happens when you regress to addictive behaviour, your memory-forming functions give way to the reptilian dopamine-releasing pleasure centres, quite conveniently, too, because you don’t really want to remember in shame the ego-shattering moments when you and your actions fail to hold up to your initial intention), ten days later I was again browsing the web, free as a bird — or, to be more precise, free as a bird enclosed in a cage made of invisible walls.
A few days ago, while I was running no less, the thought came to me: why don’t I try again with this whole less internet, less media thing? I could use the extra time to think and create. I seriously miss creating…
The next 4 days I’m going to be in Loutra doing a media fast with Daphne: each day, we will be allowed to use the internet for just 30 minutes, and that’s just for e-mail, practicalities and Rights4Water. The rest of the time, anything with a screen will be off-limits. No movies, no games, no TV, no smartphones — I will switch mine to battery-saving “dumbphone mode”– no distractions from the interestnet. The only exception will be my Sansa Clip Zip I will be using for audiobooks, podcasts and music for when I’m doing exercise. The idea is to limit options, minimise distractions and allow for deeper thought and even boredom, which will force us to be creative instead of us automatically turning to the mind-numbing net for excitement and stimulation.
May 11. I left off last Friday with this quote from Sarah Perry: “For many people, time is not a gift, but a burden, to be filled with alcohol and television and other palliative technologies.” My disagreement is not with that sentence exactly, but with two ideas that might seem to follow.
One is that it’s bad to have fun, or that all this fun stuff is distracting us from rising up and making a good society — as if we all agree about what a good society looks like and how to get there. This whole way of thinking is based on an assumption about the purpose of life: that merely having a good time is a bad use of your life, and the correct use of your life is trying to make a better world.
Humans have been trying to make a better world for thousands of years. In many ways we have failed and accidentally made a worse world, so we should be skeptical of making a better world as a noble goal. And to the extent that we have succeeded, we should appreciate and enjoy the ways the world is better, instead of being like an ambitious person who is never happy in the moment. Sometimes the path to a better world is doing something that seems fun and useless, and it leads to somewhere unexpected.
Notice that people who condemn TV and video games and recreational drugs never condemn books. Of course books are better in some ways, but the thing that’s best about reading can be good about any entertainment: it can expand your consciousness and show you other ways of being. I think even spectator sports are helpful because they generate public stories that are more honest than the public stories in politics, so someone who follows sports can more easily recognize political bullshit.
A reader sends this article from the Guardian about Eve Online, a massive multiplayer sci-fi game that has outlived similar games by making good decisions to keep players interested. People play games because they’re better than society: they’re a better fit for human nature. When we understand this, there are at least two directions we can go: make political decisions to make society more like a good game, or make society as stable and harmless as possible, and use it as a platform for artificial worlds.
While I agree with Ran deep inside of me, I’ve been influenced all my life by and gravitated towards people who strongly believe in making the world a better place, or that such a thing is possible. I’ve grown into the position that a balance between fun and “making the world a better place”, whatever that means, again, is more desirable than just having fun or following one’s one path, which might not necessarily include improving the paths of others. However, this implicit drive has brought me much conflict, self-doubt and guilt.
I find that I’m the most comfortable when I confront that “making the world a better place” is perhaps not such a good way of spending one’s time here, if purely for the quasi-impossibility of seeing results, unless one can have fun or feel good about it at the same time.
Huff. It’s been almost 8 months since I read Into the Wild and I still haven’t reviewed it. OK. Let me look at the little notes I took while reading it so I could remember the points I wanted to make about it before giving it back to its rightful owner, the Dutch girl Rian who, before lending it to me, told me that it’s in her top five books.
Hey, why not copy the notes here?
*He’s received unwarranted flak. Like Thoreau, criticism against him is really against an idea he never supported explicitly.
*Krakauer fantastic reporter/researcher. Weaves everything together, including personal and parallel/related stories, convincingly.
*Started reading at 17:30. Read the whole book in more or less 6 hours in almost a single sitting.
*Quotes at beginning of each chapter great addition—include McCandless’s own notes and favourite quotes.
*What if Krakauer had died in his own mountain climbing story he retells in the book? Would we have ever heard about Alex Supertramp?
*Similarly, if Christopher McCandless hadn’t died, then his story wouldn’t have become known. There are countless others who live the life he wanted to (and for a time, did) live, but they are virtually unknown to all but few.
*Arrogance? Indignation of his father? What exactly was the final straw that pushed him into the wild?
Then there’s Daphne’s notes who also read the book before I gave it back to Rian. She can take care of those, if she wishes.
What I can say is that McCandless is a very controversial figure. You either love him or hate him, and I’ve noticed that people’s opinion on him have very different sources. Some admire him for his courage to abandon his reality and/or prospects of what most would consider a successful and happy life, in order to venture out and into the “real” life. Others believe that his greatest achievement was to live as long as he did the way he did, that he was a free spirit, an example for all.
Then there’s those who say that Alex Supertramp’s story was just a glorified suicide, that a great part of his story has been misrepresented, especially through the movie. They dislike him for his unwarranted fame and his selfishness for abandoning his family and good fortune.
What I can say is that I’m torn. I wouldn’t call his story a glorified suicide. Perhaps it was until or after some point, but right before the end it seems that he’d learned his lesson, the famous “Happiness only real when shared”. It’s interesting that he ultimately didn’t care whether he’d die or not having chosen to live the way he did, but for crying out loud, he was practically next to civilization when he chose to live in that school bus! Some preparation could have saved him his life… if he wanted to survive, that is. Again, perhaps it had started out as a suicide before Supertramp realised what he’d got himself into and what he had really left behind.
My biggest takeaway from the book isn’t the story of the human thirst for freedom and adventure, nor the idea that “the system can be hacked, what are you waiting for?!”. It’s the notion that people naturally glorify death and dying for one’s alleged cause. That makes all the difference.
It was my first time to cross the Atlantic, indeed the farthest I’d been from home since my last time in Australia in 2002.
What took me to the second-smallest country in South America was yet another you-only-pay-30%-of-travel-costs European youth project. This one’s called Grassroots Youth Democracy. In it, youth from Greece, Italy, Ecuador, Uruguay, India and Mauritius will participate in joint research on the water context of each participating country, which in turn will culminate in a media product and relevant campaign to raise awareness on the issue of water as a basic human right and common good.
Grassroots Youth Democracy is separated in phases and will take most of our time for the rest of 2015. Phase 1, which was the purpose of the trip I just came back from, was a week-long seminar on water rights in general. Participants had the chance to make presentations of what the water context in their specific countries is, and we also made a first draft of the plan we’re going to use for organising this international campaign between ourselves: who’s gonna do what, what our research methodology will be, what we’re going to with the data etc. After all, co-ordinating a local team can be hard; one strewn across four different continents? Yeah.
Phase 2 will take place in May in Rome and will consist of a media seminar: teaching the participants how to use a camera, do interviews, edit videos, update a website and such things I have the skills to help with. Thank you, University of the Aegean!
Phase 3, which will start right after Rome and last until mid-July, will have the participants from the extra-EU countries come to Greece or Italy and do a field research on the water situation in the respective country, that is collect data for articles, videos and other material to be used in the campaign. There will be interviews with NGOs, analysing stats and delving into the unique water-specific problems of that country. In Greece, for example, the participants will look into what happened with EYATH and its privatisation and how it was avoided by the resistance of the civil society through the 2014 unofficial referendum. They will also research the problem of the lack of drinking water in some Greek islands, such as Aegina, and the sometimes even more problematic solutions corrupted authorities have come up with to alleviate the situation. These are just some examples.
Phase 4 will start right after Phase 3 and last until September. Basically it will be like Phase 3, only the other way around: the Italians and the Greeks, of which there’s four of each, will do the same kind of field research in pairs in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mauritius and India. This is when I’m going back to Uruguay for two months, during the southern heart of winter! No Greek summer for me this year.
After all the above, we’ll collect all the data we’ll have got and make something out of it: a small book, an online database, a documentary, a social media assault… a little bit of everything. This will be our awareness campaign (and I hope it will end up a little bit more exciting than I’m afraid I’m making it sound here.) There will be a final conference/presentation of results but not a lot is known about it yet.
To be perfectly honest, Phase 1 in Montevideo, the one that just finished, needed more outdoors activities. The presentations and material discussed on water issues were interesting and our team-building was successful, but after a certain point I found it hard to concentrate on Powerpoint after Powerpoint and group brain-storming activity after group brain-storming activity. Being in the same room for hours on end with little chance of going out in the warm Autumn sun apart from during the short coffee breaks and the lunch (which was admittedly DELICIOUS and very vegetarian-friendly—THANK YOU CRAZY MARIO, cook of La Fonda!) made it much worse. During the first few days we saw practically zero of the city and at the end of each session I felt much more exhausted than I believe I should have.
No matter. In the end it was a valuable getting-to-know-you with the team and we did some important work. We will just have to work hard from here on out.
…what? You want to read about Montevideo and Uruguay, NOT the seminar? What are you, crazy?!
OK, get this: Uruguay is an extremely interesting country, given its small size and low importance on the grand scale of things. Sorry, let me rephrase that, because everything that’s ever taken place on this planet is of extremely low importance on the grand scale of things—low importance as far as human societies go; countries, politics… you know, that sort of thing. I mean, what do you know about Uruguay?
What I knew was that the country’s (now ex-) president donated 90% of his salary to charity and generally lived super simply, and that recently they legalised marijuana. That’s pretty much everything /r/worldnews would let through the filter. Ahem…
Let me tell you: both of these things are true.
Mujica with his three-legged dog and some maté. More on that in a sec.
José “Pepe” Mujica is seen as a bit of a populist in Uruguay itself, but here are eight reasons why he should be missed by the rest of us, according to The Independent:
1. He donated 90% of his salary to charity. 2. And lived on a farm. 3. He drives a 1987 VW Beetle. 4. And picks up hitch-hikers. 5. He legalised marijuana. 6. He leaves the economy in rude health. 7. He’s just not like other politicians 8. And all that after being shot six times and being put in jail for 14 years for opposing the country’s former dictatorship.
Have a look at the article for a few more details, it’s worth it. What are the chances a guy like this could ever be the leader of your country?
SWIM doing a preparation of a special Uruguayan herbal incense.
Now, that other thing. “You know that in Uruguay marijuana was recently legalised, don’t you?”, said one of the Uruguayan participants to me before I could even ask her anything about it. “Everybody does it here. Even ten years ago people in suits would light one up after work. The thing is, you can’t go somewhere to buy it. Not like that. You have to be a resident and a member of a marijuana club if you want to purchase it. But many people have a little plant or two at home and will soon offer you some!”
I suppose the above is true for young people, but who knows? It didn’t seem to me that marijuana use was 100% socially accepted in Uruguay, there must be some controversy remaining, but it looked close to it. I say they have the right idea. There really is zero reason marijuana should be as illegal as it is in such big part of the world. Zero. Addiction-related issues, whenever they arise, should be treated medically and psychologically, similar to the way alcoholism is treated, not be a matter of concern for law enforcement. This system has already been adopted in a lot of countries. Have a look at this map caught from the wikipedia article on the legality of cannabis around the world:
But there’s a bit more to Uruguay than that.
What does this flag remind you of? They have the same number of stripes, too. Want another fun fact that goes with the similarity between the flags? Both Uruguay and Greece were de facto created in 1828. But, as I learned recently, the Greek flag as we know it now was standardised during the military dictatorship. Before that it used to be simply this:
This was the state flag and the one we use now was the merchant and national flag, before the former was abolished completely.
Back to the othercountry with blue and white stripes on its flag.
Uruguay’s name comes from the river forming the natural border between it and Argentina. It is the indigenous Guaraní language for “the river where the painted birds live.” Beautiful image, isn’t it? It flows out into the that bay to the left of the map, the famous Río de la Plata — the river plate. It’s a hallmark and a point of reference for both Argentina and Uruguay. Some consider this formation more of a river delta than a bay, but really it’s somewhere in between: in Montevideo and even as far out as Punta del Este, the water is much less salty than normal. There’s no clear point where the río ends and the sea starts. Truly a unique formation.
Next: a brief overview of the country in video form. This video was funded by the Uruguayan Ministry of Tourism. I’m serious.
Uruguay es el mejor país: Uruguay is the best country. A semiotically complete touristic message if I ever saw one. We should try something like that back home.
In fact, there’s plenty of other policy “novelties” this country has going for it we should be trying out in Greece. Barring the relatively high cost of living, the not-too-great wages and the kind of plain landscapes (heh), in a few ways it really is one of the best countries out there. For a start, they have managed to stave off privatisation of their public sector almost completely, only selling off their mobile phone operators. Water itself has become a constitutionally-reserved state-managed human right since a relevant referendum was conducted in 2004. That’s impressive no matter what way you look at it. In addition, same-sex marriage has been legal for two years.
All the above together puts most of the “progressive world” to shame, let alone our backwards little country called Greece. Then again, Uruguay is a secular society, in stark contrast to our country where the embarrassingly rich church is still constitutionally connected to the state, which, just to remind you, means that Orthodox Christianity is taught at schools, priests are paid with our hard-earned IMF and European loan money (and pay no tax in return) and the country is still, for all intents and purposes, exclusivelyOrthodox. I won’t get started with nationalism and Greek superiority/inferiority complexes…
Tell me, how many people would you imagine enjoy the benefits of living in this little country? It’s whole population is barely that of Athens at ~3.5 million people, with roughly half of that concentrated in Montevideo. This bit surprised me, because I’ve always thought of South America as the land of mega cities. To illustrate, nearby Buenos Aires has a metro population of almost 4 times that of Uruguay as a whole, and Sao Paulo, which isn’t such a long way away either, is close to 6 times that.
For its modest count of human residents, this small country is the holder of a different record: it has the most cattle-per-capita ratio in the world: there are roughly 3.59 Uruguayan cows for each Uruguayan person. Impressive as that may be, note that this number still collectively accounts for just ~1% of global bovine populations.
Gauchos — Argentinian/Uruguayan cowboys
With so much mooing going on, you’d think the guys would have some decent yogurt. Nope… Even the “integral” yogurt, the one most similar to consistency to the ones we enjoy in Greece, contained sugar. This reminded me of Bulgaria, which most Bulgarians claim to have fantastic yogurt—supposedly very successful and sought after in South Korea. Needless to say, this legendary Bulgarian dairy product is nowhere to be found, or perhaps I tried it and just couldn’t tell the difference. What can I say, years of straggisto are bound to leave a mark.
Not all Uruguayan products are shoddy, though. Far from it. Mate (pronounced máte) is for Uruguayans what frappé is for Greeks, or, according to some Greeks, what it used to be, as freddo espressos have become more popular. Mate is an invigorating hot drink, like coffee or tea, ideally shared among a circle of friends. People drink it in wooden cups that slightly look like coconut shells but are made of gourd (or calabash). In it they drink the mate herb tea, which they infuse with hot water poured from a thermos and refill many times. It is drunk with a metal straw-like instrument called a bombilla (pronounced bombisha in Rioplatense Spanish). In the video below you can see an English speaker preparing mate.
I think I’ve written enough for now. I congratulate you if you made it this far! Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure, half of which are taken by me and the others by Martina.
Punta del Este, a stop on the Greek team’s Atlantic Coast single-day road trip.The wake of Eduarno Galeano. We were lucky (?) enough to have just arrived in the country when this great person passed away.Street Art MontevideoThe view from Faro José Ignacio.Plaza de IndependenciaEach night a different team of participants had to prepare dinner… one of the highlights of the seminar for me.Enjoying empanadas with part of the group.Decoration at the Posada al Sur. A sketch by Quino and a quote by Eduardo Galeano: “Joy requires more courage than sorrow, for, at the end of the day, sorrow we’re accustomed to.”Martina could easily pass for an Uruguana like this!Candombe, the beat of the Montevideo night.View on the Posada terrace and old Montevideo, where the seminar took place. Unfortunately, not upstairs on the terrace.
For dessert:
There is a Milonga at the centre of Montevideo, a public place where people of all ages meet a few times per week to dance and learn Tango.
The song below can be heard most evening at the Milonga and, as I was told, features in the playlists of most tango meetings. It’s called the “Greek tango.” I’m sure you know it.
It looks at the topic from a consumer rights point of view, but the effects on the environment from the production of so many gadgets and their subsequent chucking that ultimately leads them to some cancer-ridden, polluted third world country, are just as significant.
How long will these gadgets last? Where will they ultimately end up? Will I be strong and responsible enough to make a different choice next time I need new electronic gear? Is there a responsible choice that would differentiate a user from a mere consumer?
Here I am lying in bed typing away on my new Huawei g620 S. A few days ago I was in Alsos listening to Mysterious Universe and decided it was time to do it, take the plunge. Like they saySmartphones are tools. What could I end up doing with having one in my own hands after all this time of resisting? It’s convenient, sure, but It’s also an experiment for myself, for judging how far down the rabbit hole I will allow myself to go.
It all came together nicely, since my mother hadn’t used her bonus from Cosmote, the little bait they use for making you renew with them (I haven’t forgotten that I hate them, just so you know) so I got it for pretty cheap. Similar to how i got many of my phones in the past. Come to think of it, I wonder how many different phones I’ve used or owned in my life. Must be close to ten by now. Jesus. How worthless tech has come to be. It has come to this!
Anyway. Typing this with my thumbs feels weird. Having my own smartphone feels weird. Well, it’s not useable as a phone yet cause my old SIM card wasn’t mini enough to use in this new hi-tech gadget. I don’t get it. My older phones were all smaller in size. It’s not like it won’t fit. Anywho, I’m enjoying having a smartphone that doesn’t yet work as a phone. That was the idea actually, but iPod touches aren’t getting any newer and I got this one almost for free, after all.
I have to admit. For all that I wanted to dive into the app world, the permissions I have to allow for each one of them and my rights to privacy I’m obliged to blithely forfeit makes me uncomfortable. I know I do so all the time without blinking an eye during the whole rest of life but… Do people just get used to it? I mean, the app I’m using to type this out right now has my password for accessing the admin page of this blog, and it’s not as if it’s developed by WordPressi itself…
Not to mention of course Google and it’s thing for wanting to know everything all the time. How is a man to choose between using a new account for all this or electing to make his invisible secret file with Google THAT much more complete? Connecting my Google search, YouTube past and everything else with an always traceable device that can snoop even more juicy data even more efficiently?
But then taking selfies with geotagging is cool. No really, I tried it, it’s like magic. All about this gadget is like magic. Is it smoke and mirrors or perhaps something more substantial?
I feel as if this post can be the first in a series of posts about smartphones. I’m declaring this right now cause I’m sleepy. Twilight (the app!) worked as intended… Google, I’m now going to sleep, just in case you missed that
“Words are weapons” is this book’s tagline. It’s true. Think about it: by speaking you can guide another person’s train of thought. The limits to the destination of the other person’s train of thought is only a matter of how well you speak. Machine Man sealed Max Barry’s greatness as a science fiction author so I knew I had to come back for more. Enter Lexicon.
Have you ever met a person who can charm you with their words? You don’t know how or why, you only know that this person, either consciously or unconsciously, presses all the right buttons to make you succumb to their will. It’s a force above and beyond what you would normally call your typical, apparently rational decision-making process; it’s a pair of hands that hacks into your brain and into your program, the one you have meticulously created for yourself, making you gladly and willingly do things you would have “normally” scoffed at. Note: I’d like to use many more quotation marks on that “normally” if I could avoid looking like a post-modern “everything goes” pseudo-academic douchebag while doing so. I’m not sure it’s possible so let’s leave it at that.
What if there was a secret organisation that was not only aware of this weakness of the human mind to appropriate persuasion methods, but had turned the whole thing into a science, an art form, something to be studied at a Hogwarts-like institution for teens with a natural talent in manipulation?
Max Barry took this idea and ran with it past the horizon. Lexicon welcomes and incorporates aspects of sociology, neurology, linguistics and the history of language, psychology and personality types, in that you have to know one’s personality type out of 200 or so, also known as “segments”, before you can most effectively persuade them. It’s smart by implying a lot that it doesn’t say, saying a lot that is interesting and makes sense, and connecting it all together by making it fast-paced and suspenseful with just the right amount of horror. Max Barry isn’t just intelligent, he can write a damn good story and believable characters I want to see walk out of all the mess alive and well.
Another thing I liked was the interjection of online articles and snips of online conversations between chapters, hinting at the possibility of the book’s reality existing in our universe too, behind the huge system of control and profiling that the internet and the web are (also) shaping up to be. Each chapter made me think, and each snip between the chapters made me think some more. The fact that I have no idea whether the articles and conversations are real or not, even though I would put money on their genuineness, is referring to what I said the book saying a lot just by implication, or even by implication of implication.
I would have given it five stars if it wasn’t for some action-packed scenes that left me wondering what had happened. Sometimes I find it hard to follow such parts in general, and I don’t think it’s my difficulty with very specific action-oriented words and use of language when it comes to reading in English, since I have the same problem when reading in Greek. It’s the same with movies when there is a rapid procession of shots in a scene, like in the duel in SW: Episode III or in any recent disaster or superhero movie. I just don’t bother to visualise the setting and follow the action. I suppose it’s a matter of how much the book has inspired my engagement. Most action scenes in books as well as movies fail to hold my interest sufficiently, or I don’t bother with the specific details of the environment etc. Hard to say why, but the effect is there. Also on why four stars and not five: the bareword. I felt it was awkward and easier to see through for being a plot device. But I won’t say more.
If nothing else I wrote above made you warmer towards the book, at least have a look at this, the Lexicon Quiz, from Max Barry’s website. It’s a variation of the quiz used in the book for determining one’s personality segment and/or if they have the talent for becoming a poet (a member of the aforementioned secret organisation). It’s remarkably clever, cross-disciplinary just the way I like them, aware of the cultural context in which it exists and… well… placing fundamental importance on the personality type distinction between cat people and dog people. It’s a very good representation of the general feel the book gives off.
In August 2013 I was in France. I wrote a post about it, too, and made a video quite different from the one above.
Last star to the right, and straight on ’til morning, or Dernière étoile à droite, tout droit jusqu’au matin as is its original title, is an iteration of what took place there.
I randomly appear a number of times on the film but my best contribution are the final words in it. If you don’t want to watch the rest of it (I suggest you do) and would rather just listen to my silky voice full of ums talking about our creating today the civilization of tomorrow, go to 40:43.
I played with the idea of simply posting “congratulations” as a comment under this update. I didn’t. I figured that if I’m not interested in this information, I should simply unfriend this person, not post a sarcastic comment. But if I’m not interested in being friends with this person, what is it, I wonder, that is keeping me from expressing my disdain?
Something about Facebook makes it very hard to criticise people who are using Facebook as intended, i.e. for carefully constructing a small shrine in their name open to the public. It only allows for a very limited range of types of interaction. Your options are: 1) liking, 2) commenting, and 3) ignoring, and this is starting to reflect on real-life interactions, with the “we’re all such good friends!” taking the cake. Ever heard of “if you have nothing nice to say, better say nothing at all?” It’s an axiom way older than Facebook itself, sure, but its validity today is constantly being reinforced by the congratulatory nature of social media. Your circle exists to feed your ego, not challenge it, and if there is ever some kind of challenge placed, it’s in the passive-aggressive form of Facebook envy, that is comparing your backstage to other people’s highlight reel, as they say, which, by the way, never ever leads to any positive feelings at all.
What if I told you that whenever you post something on Facebook to show off and make others notice you, some of them secretly hate you for it because they envy you and can’t be like you? What if I told you that that number is probably the majority of your precious friends?
