“You Don’t Need My Number —
just look me up ‘kay?”
At the risk of sounding like a 50 year old woman (more in reference to my own mother and no generational generalizations in specific) instead of the supposedly “hip-and-happening” 20 year olds I should be identifying with; technology eludes me.
Lately, if you go for a job interview, you get bombarded with questions like, “How many Instagram followers do you have?” and “How would you use Twitter to improve your chances of landing a job?”. I understand the value of these questions, really I do. Being able to promote yourself on any forum is an invaluable skill to have. Needless to say, networking is one of the essential keys to success and surrounding yourself with people that can get you there.
This isn’t really what I should be getting at because it makes perfect sense to me. However, these same principles also apply in the social sphere. We need to constantly promote our personal selves to get by. If you don’t choose the right lighting for your profile picture or your bio is lacking, the Tinder-dites will swipe past your profile and BAM! In one moment of poor judgement you’re sleeping alone forever…
That being said, for the humans lacking the necessary aptitudes to survive in this century’s social paradigm, it is clear we have work to do. Or rather, we need an app to separate the connected from the people who will write you an email or give you a call just to organize a physical interaction.
Could all the cave-people please stand up?
It really isn’t because I refuse to move with the times, that I feel about social media how a donkey feels when you ask it to do anything other than what it has planned for the day. I understand, that similar to the importance of body language and register, the ticks and tells on social media are just as bountiful and still somewhat unexplored. But is energy still a thing? Phones charge, don’t we also need to know where our power sources lie?
Staring at the stars and walking barefoot on grass are two things I can’t go without. Just as sitting next to someone meaningful in blissful silence is such a special thing. Hugs? Skin to skin contact releases Oxycontin friends. Surely we can’t completely abandon how our bodies function because its too much effort and time is money? I hope money never steals from me, because what could I ever give money to buy back what it took from me?
How do you charge a person?
What I’m trying to say is, you don’t need my number if you are going to use this connection to put me in purgatory — that place in between your life and my own. To me being able to contact someone at any time and from any place is magic. A string of numbers allows us to surpass time and space but our intentions are what keeps it pure. Forums like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and thousands more, don’t bring us in connection with one another but instead they entertain us and deceive us by distancing us from the humans we are in connection with. I don’t want to take away from the intercontinental relationships we can now maintain (because if it wasn’t for Mark Zuckerberg I would miss my friends terribly and I owe him, I know) but in reality this opportunity for inter-connectedness has made us lazy. I don’t want to know the world superficially if I can experience the world intimately with a few characters at my side.
“…if it wasn’t for Mark Zuckerberg I would miss my friends terribly and I owe him, I know.”
Knowledge is at my fingertips. My voice is currently being broadcasted all over the world from a small town in Western Cape, South Africa. But here I get to peer into the minds and souls of the masses. Here I get to experience vicariously what I might never get the chance to feel and learn vicariously of all the life lessons that may never cross my path.
It is not my intention to share every facet of me with all of you. I also can’t say I know any of you no matter how dedicated I am to reading what you have to say. Here we are in a meeting of the minds and it is glorious at that but sometimes I think we forget how compartmentalized we have made our lives. We forget the value of holistic self-care and holistic introspect.
As a human I send my love and best wishes because I love my human family, but as a person I look forward to all the souls I am yet to meet.
Until then,
L.
