Social media is one hell of a drug. It’d have you swallowing giant gummy worms whole at the back of a sip’n’strut. Oh sure, the catharsis is nice, but at some point you’ll need to ask yourself “why are we like this?”
Lately I’ve been noticing how some comments make me want to exclaim “IT’S A TRAP!”. Obvious, open and quite frankly kinda basic baiting, like some disgruntled parent at a PTA, smacking his chest with his bare hand, telling another parent “cash me outside bro how bout dat?”
Like okay, this one comment was doing a set up where the intention was to either get someone to A) depose Hamas or B) defend Hamas, with the intent of jumping down someone’s throat.
Why are people like this, mommy? And why am I calling someone “mommy” on social media? Can’t we just make homemade cookies like we used to do on rainy nights, and be happy? And why is daddy always drinking the unhappy juice? I think I probably already answered that question…
Mommy, I want McDonald’s!!!
We are social creatures and there’s also loneliness epidemics popping everywhere, people are interacting less with people and interacting more with their opinion on the ideas of others.
While opinions are important to develop your own character and critical thinking skills, there’s an inherent competitive nature on social platforms, where having a winning argument has become the main goal, and opinions that others identify with, lead to further divisions, instead of making like-minded people gather.
Things do look grim for the future now that you’ll have AI running your echo chambers, distancing you from objective reality and just further isolating you into a self indulging solipsism.
So you ask, why are we like this? The truth is that it’s more economical and rewarding to find self validation by dismissing others. It requires less effort as you only establish a connection to hurt and mock. You don’t have to go through the effort of learning, teaching, helping and being helped.
Coming back to your example, we usually have a set of values, whether found through life or imposed by others, that we identify with, if we see something going against them we get frustrated and we want to do something about it, since most of us realistically cannot do shit about things then we go on and rant, but when others do the exact same, we fight them, it’s cheap, it’s easy it’s perfect to fulfil our need for action.
What can we do to fight this?
To be honest, I’m not sure.
I just try to help others around me by listening to them and being interested in what they want to say.
You can get off social media. People were better off before it.