This past few weeks, I’ve seen quite a questionable amount of weird behavior until one finally broke the camel’s back. 

To preface this, I will say that it’s been interesting to watch how the predominance of social media has brought with it this era of “performativism” like never before. In times past, we were able to retreat to our homes and relax from the performance that merely existing in society requires. However this is no longer the case because social media has invaded our homes robbing us off our alone time. You’re either enamored by the lives of other’s making contents from their bedrooms or you’re in yours making the content, an endless stream of accessibility like we have never seen. 

It never stops as the algorithm keeps refreshing giving us more, perhaps we now feel the urge to always be updating, tweeting every thought before it has taken shape and we’ve had time to question it. 

To what sparked this post, how bad has it gotten that we turn our entire lives into content including grief? 

I can understand posting about losing a loved one and all the emotions that comes with that after you have processed those feeling or at least had a minute to sit with it. But what baffles me is how people take to social media to actively engage in a spectacle of their grief as it is happening in real time. It’s the mommy influencers that records as she rushes her kid who is chronically ill to the hospital or the family member that tweets about the loss of the family member for the entire world to see and even possibly inform others who were close to them that this is how the person passed on. 

Can you imagine finding out you lost someone on twitter? 

I say this while treading lightly because grief is a heavy topic but at what point have we crossed the line? When is it too much? When do we need to put the damn phones DOWN?! 

We’ve become so used to being attached to social media that it’s scrambled up our critical thinking. People would do anything for views these days even staging interactions to get reactions out of people. It’s like we can no longer exist outside of our little bubble on social media. 

People make instagram accounts for their kids and respond as the kid. You make tiktok montages of you crying and then perfectly edit them with a sad song to post and hashtags to go viral. It’s absurd, is it not? 

You record people in public without their consent and post them in order to make fun of them. You treat everyone as a potential viral content and nothing more hoping to maximize your views and increase your viewer’s retention time. You lord over others because you have a massive following, acting like a god who can do no wrong. It’s all very telling and makes me wonder, Did social media do this? or did it just expose it? 

And perhaps the most ironic of them all is texting chat gpt as if it is a friend while simultaneously complaining about the loneliness epidemic. We’ve traded going outside and having normal interactions for a 12 hour screen time where we have no real thought process and doom scroll consuming so much brain rot content that we might just be getting dumber and any attempt at thought provoking conversation is met with “It’s not that deep”. Cancel culture ( which I do think has its merits when used properly ) has turned into this tiresome circle of attacking everyone for the tiniest thing from staring too long to a fleeting facial expression. It’s all too stressful for everyone.