Summary for when this video inexplicably is no longer viewable in a month, leaving my brog with a post with a dead video link: Our protagonist, Scott, who lives a fairly mundane existence, after perusing through his Facebook wall where everyone’s fluff posts depict lives more magical, exhilarating and interesting than his, begins embellishing his mundane happenings with false optimism and occasional fudging of the truth. The superficial piling up of likes encourages him to keep doing it, but eventually the world comes collapsing around him, and even he can’t spin the follies into overly enthusiastic status updates, resulting in the downward spiral of social degradation until people just begin blocking him.
Not to sound overly pessimistic, but this is exactly how I envision a lot of people utilizing Facebook and other social media outlets. In front of an audience where very few can actually dispute or challenge, you can say almost anything you want, and hope that viewers view your perception as their reality. I’m convinced that people occasionally factor in the potential to be able to boast about it on social media to excite others, as justification to be excited about something, instead of the days when people would be excited about it, solely for themselves.
It’s kind of like me, with baseball. I know like five people that actually like baseball at all, so there’s no point in posting anything about how excited I am to go to the game, or being on my way to a new ballpark, because so few people will care, yet in spite of the fact that I know how superficial and inconsequential that really is, it makes me feel uninteresting, uncared for and inconsequential if anything I say falls onto deaf ears.
So I don’t bother.
But god damn, post a picture of a corgi, a recipe of something with way too much bacon on it, an esoteric meme targeted at an audience of three, or strategically name drop well-known people from niche circles, and watch the attention come gushing out, like a faucet turned on.
I was always reluctant to hop aboard any social media platform for the most part, and lately, I’ve been feeling like I might have been smarter back then, than I am now. Sure, this is akin to a mood swing, but thoughts and feelings don’t necessary vanish, just because I might be in a better mood, but as for the time being, I can’t say that it’s for the best that I see all sorts of people, like on a platform like Facebook.
In some cases, it confirms what things people may or may not be interested in, but it also often demonstrates just how ADD, or how misguided people can be when they spout off opinions about things they don’t necessarily educate themselves on, because they need to share their opinion as soon as possible, so that they sound current and relevant. It would be severely hypocritical of me to state that such can’t be the case with me, but I also like to think that I restrain more than I don’t, because I don’t want to post excessive fluff or things that I’m completely unprepared to actually discuss if the opportunity presented itself.
I digress. I like this video, because I think it’s extremely true in so many cases, whether I know the people or not. Everyone embellishes their lives to a public audience to some degree, but it’s funny to see the few instances of exaggeration, like when Scott claims to have run 20 kilometers, before getting back into his car and driving off. I wouldn’t put it past people I know to go through a little bit of lengths to make something sound way cooler than it actually is.
