Alone in a crowded room — the silent pandemic
I want you to imagine this:
A brooding young person enters into a noisy, crowded room. There are hundreds of animated conversations going on, each its own world. However, our person silently proceeds to the center of the room where there is an elevated platform. He walks up to this platform, climbs up, and then loudly yells something only vaguely intelligeble (not that anyone cared). There is a mometary silence from the crowd, and then the chatter resumes. A few people nod their heads in approval, but the rest are indifferent. Finally, our subject hops off the platform, and silently leaves the room — not speaking a word to anyone. Whatever he said is quickly forgotten and the hundreds of conversations continue.
What would you characterize this person as? There are two extreme possibilites:
- A chronically depressed, low self-esteem individual, who doesn’t believe what he has to say is important to the people around him. (which is why he walks in, speaks to no one in particular, and then leaves)
- A self-important, narcisstic person who believes everyone has a pressing need to listen to whatever she has to say. (which is why she walks in, climbs on a pedestal, speaks to everyone/yet no one from a distance, and leaves, caring little whether anyone understood her message)
What if I told you that you’re in that dystopian room everyday?
The noisy crowded room with hundreds of conversations is the endless instagram/snapchat/facebook feed, your monologue from the pedestal is your story update/snap/status update, and the people’s nods are the empty likes.
Don’t agree? Let me point out the similarities using myself as an example.
- How many people react to your story/status updates? My ‘most liked’ post on Insta, a post about my college graduation in 2019 received 223 likes. Out of the 692 people who follow me, that amounts to 223/692 (32.25%).
- How many people hear your message? About 225 accounts view my Insta stories, out of a follower count of 692 (32.51%). Those who react to it in some way is even lower (on the order of 0.1%).
- What does a like or a reaction from a someone even mean, other than a shallow nod from a person already bombarded with thousands of other conversations?
Doesn’t this sound more like the dystopian room I just described?
The consequences of being in this room even tragic, especially for your self-perception. Protracted stays in this room can produce two opposite types of individuals. One who is so narcisstic that every small meal she eats, every tree/flower/bird she sees, etc. deserves to be broadcast to the whole world. And the other? A person with such low self-esteem, who recognizes that most of those who hear his message don’t even care. Of those who do, they choose to express their affirmation of your message in the form of a hollow ‘like’.
The simple fact is that the human mind is not used to engaging in the type of conversations we have on social media. In a standard living room/dinner table conversation which the human species has been having for millenia, one may be talking to a group of 5–7 people at most with a single theme, which may evolve over the course of the discussion from politics to sport to work and then back to politics. However, the modern mindless social media feed is a smattering of hundreds of conversations from hundreds of people, with no single theme. There are messages of social justice, physical fitness, food, travel all combined under a single endless scroll. The effects on the mind are devastating. Throw in a pandemic, and you have a recipe for insanity.
COVID-19 removed all the in-person, healthy social accoutrements we’re used to (the only true form of social engagement, in my opinion), and left us in the dull digital world of likes/follows/retweets. Predictably, this excerbated an already worse situation. It’s no wonder why the silent pandemic among people in their 20’s, 30’s is loneliness and depression.
