9.

I am quite excited to read other people’s blog posts because this prompt is probably my favorite so far. It is  frustrating, being in the position of knowing something is so obviously false but being surrounded by people who follow said thing or idea or belief. It is a daily part of my life to scroll through my news feed and see the loads of crap, and I could spend an hour arguing each and everything. Because of my complex and aggressive feelings I feel about so many different things online, I decided to pick a more abstract concept to call out.

Nobody cares about you. Seriously.

 Present day social media is based on the idea that your 500 insta followers or your 250 Facebook friends actually care about what you’re doing and what your posting. Having an online presence has become so deeply instilled in our modern age society, and we have all been tricked to care about people we don’t care about! Do you ever feel compelled to comment on your coworker’s son’s post? ‘Like’ your sisters friends boyfriends picture? Why? Do you actually care what they are doing? Other than being nosey: do you truly care? Or are you just investing your like into them so that they might like one of your future posts.    You don’t actually care about how Brittany’s spending her afternoon… and no one cares how you are spending yours. It is all a fabrication.

In high school almost all my girlfriends would edit pictures all day, make countless drafts of different captions, just to wait until prime time to post a picture with maximum ‘like’ potential.   This work just so a person, whom they have no connection with, will like their post. The amount of time we spend summarizing our lives, so people can witness the snippets is ridiculous. And for what!! Nobody cares. Not in a rude “Shut up nobody cares way”, but if you never shared another post on Facebook or tweeted your thoughts ever again, 95% of your followers wouldn’t even notice.

So why do we do it? Who knows. We are in too deep now, we will probably never become separated from social media ever again. Maybe we are comforted by the idea that other people want to see what we are doing and are interested in our lives. We have surrendered our independence and security, but at least I got 196 likes.

To finish off I’d like to reference a scene from American Psycho.

In this scene, Patrick Bateman tells a bartender his deepest ‘secret’, and the bar tender doesn’t react. It is absurd that she wouldn’t react to such an outrageous statement, which led to the popular belief that he didn’t actually tell her ‘I like to dissect girls’, but that it was just in his head. I believe the other side, that he did tell her that he was a true psycho, but she just didn’t care. People in this movie are so self-absorbed, and so eager to show other people their own success, but in reality, no one cares about anybody. The characters are so self-absorbed that they cannot even hear about other people’s successes, because they are too wrapped up in themselves. It is taken to such an extreme that Bateman is going around people and blatantly telling them that he loves killing people, but no one is listening because no one cares!!!

Everybody is so quick to share, but nobody is actually listening.