After like two months, I decided to get off my high horse perched atop a pedestal that was boosted up on a soap box, and opened up Facebook. I had a couple of new friend requests, some group conversations that were now a month past since the last message, and 99 new notifications that’s really more, but Facebook only registers up to 99, and apparently, only one month’s worth. But all in all, I still don’t feel like I really missed anything.
Admittedly, I’d been peculiar about when I’d dive back in, because I didn’t really want to jump back in the midst of a tragedy, or too big of a political shit storm, and if it were up to me, I’d like to have something interesting to post about as well. But then shit like all the killings of black people, the bombing of Istanbul airport, protests, politics and other things kept happening around the world, and if they were insufferably covered by the media, I could only imagine that the opinionating by people on social media would have been a hundred times worse.
The thing is, if I waited for the world to be peaceful for just a week, I’d probably be waiting until I was 90 years old. So I realized that I needed to lower my expectations, and when the coast was clear for like five minutes, I dove back in. Not to mention that I was still kind of on my high for being the first winner of the Willy’s Road Trip, and I figure it would be something somewhat interesting to post about.
I’ll admit that I was pretty surprised at just how saturating Pokémon Go has covered the world, magnified by how like 80% of my internet friends are all gung-ho into the game as well. Typically, I’m the type that avoids super hyped things like this, but in this rare instance, I’m also one of the sheep that’s also currently playing the game. Now I’m not the type to post screencaps of everything I’m doing, because as much as I’d like to play it more, I just don’t have the time as others currently do, but what I’m trying to say is that I’m relieved that people are more exuberant about talking about Pikachus rather than politics.
Also, it’s really amusing to see how people playing the pikachu game* have created such news tidbits such as people finding dead bodies and loaded guns, people using the game to rob others, stabbings, bully-deterring, among other amusing stories that have probably just scratched the surface of things to come.
*my personal name for Pokémon Go
Ultimately, what it all boils down to is that despite spending two months off of theFacebook, unsurprisingly, I feel like I have missed out on nothing. I’ve scrolled back as far as Facebook will allow me to, in order to try and see what people have done over that span, but nothing appeared to have been anything out of the ordinary. Sure, lots of fluffy remarks about Orlando, Turkey, and the rise of protests and police anti-trust. But this is the kind of shit that was quite commonplace, even when I was checking numerous times a day, every day.
An interesting byproduct of the lengthy avoidance is that even though I’ve broken the chain of separation, I don’t often feel compulsions to check nearly as often as I used to in the past. Maybe people aren’t doing things that make me feel like I should be envious or missing out, or maybe my apathy has grown over the last two months. Maybe it’s something a little more clinical. But the thing is that I just don’t care about what’s going on, on social media like I must have in the past.
It’s like I’ve devalued the worth of social media in my daily routines. Frankly, I think it’s kind of better that way, because I’m finding that I’m more apt to read news and websites with slightly more face and substance than solely opinions, and I’m giving more thought to the shows and movies on Netflix, and the books on Kindle that I would rather indulge in myself, over wasting minutes-into-hours seeing what internet friends are talking about, themselves.
And as long as the property is currently relevant, playing with pikachus > posting about political poo yes I am trying to use alliteration here.
