Are you aware of the term called “Attention Seeking” in SocialMedia? No? You should try then and now, because our existence depends on it. Damn to the authors who wrote about Existentialism and to find the inherent meaning of our lives, well what do they know. Instagram never existed in their time, else Kafka and Sartre would be grooving to trendy songs which landed on my timeline to witness every shake and stir of the explosive energy of influencers. Small or big accounts doesn’t matter, they create a wide pool of entertainment for spectators like me, so that I can be a little judge penitent and guffaw through the purgatory.
There is a new name in twitter for rejecting hypotheses (that is still very much used in scientific world) to replace with new opinions called “Cancel Culture”. Even the insomniacs will witness a new author or an artist being cancelled in a very less time on waking up. If you don’t cancel and put your much accustomed opinion, you will be cancelled from the group. See that’s how everyone hangs in a balance between Individuality and Conformity. Do we care about it? Nah. As a herd, we follow whatever the trend is. And it’s so cool to cancel someone, rather than introspecting the “why” around it. The need for a hero to guide and command makes everyone impossible to separate art and artist, shows how naiveté we are? Show me one flawless human, because there aren’t one.
And comes the pet owners, hey I like this trend, keeps me and daughter a worthy screen time. But amplifying the sound of fart of your own pup through a microphone, doesn’t that sound a little embarrassment for them because getting their consent is out of the question, eh? One of the annoying group is the one which masquerades by selling compassion online and holding moral superiority because they are animal lovers. Even a little part of me is aware of putting such nice stories for greater good, doesn’t it seems weird to share it often for the sake of likes and appreciation? Who would have thought, validation is the new oxygen. If you have to feel good about yourself, you need to breathe it in.
The thought of self-containment being butchered in the realm of Social media is scary. Freedom of Expression has gone a toss when so much of it is used only by propagandists of politics. Well who cares, all we care about is only about fine tuning our account into a self-pity for some and self-appraisal for many. Grind of everyday work and the pandemic in which we are cooped up inside home made many artists of their own art. Albert Camus in his book “Myth of Sisyphus” concluded one must imagine Sisyphus happy even at the futility or absurdity of rolling the stone again and again. Grinning from ear to ear, I would say our modern Sisyphus are not just happy, they are on euphoric high lest to imagine.
Is the need for validation a social construct or an innate behaviour? Cause can be any, are we ready to decondition the brain to be conscious of who ourselves are becoming in to? A being or a having, whatever.
