The 21st Century Dilemma…

Finally pulled this post out from this dust-ridden draft of mine… No matter how I edited it, still seems more offensive than ever but anyhow…

Some call it the Naked Photo Test, and it works something like this: say a photo turns up of us nakedly doing something that would shame ourselves and our family for generations. Bestiality, perhaps. Ask ourselves how many people in our life that would believe in us even after looking at that photo and still look into our eyes. Underneath all the glitz and glamour…On average, we did probably have at most two.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

From the Washington Post:

Whereas nearly three-quarters of people in 1985 reported they had a friend in whom they could confide, only half in 2004 said they could count on such support. The number of people who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped by more than half, from about 19 percent to about 8 percent.

The results, being published today in the American Sociological Review, took researchers by surprise because they had not expected to see such a steep decline in close social ties.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

The average number of close friends we say we have is dropping fast, down dramatically in just the last 20 years. Why oh why? Well, first of all…

#1. We don’t have enough annoying strangers in our lives.

That’s not sarcasm. Annoyance is something we build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we’re able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we’re able to handle it.

The problem is we’ve built an awesome, sprawling web of technology meant purely to let us avoid annoying people. Do all our Christmas shopping online and avoid the fat lady ramming her cart into you at Tesco. Spend RM5k on a home theater system so we can see movies on a big screen without that stupid guy kicking the back of your seat. Hell, download the whole movie from torrents and we don’t even have to spend the day driving our car to that crowded shopping mart/cinema.

Get stuck in the waiting room at the doctor? No way we’re striking up a conversation with the smelly old man in the next seat. We’ll plug the iPod into our ears and have a text conversation with a friend or play our PSP. Filter that annoyance right out of our own world.

Now that would be awesome if it were actually possible to keep all of the irritating shit out of our pathetic lifes, isn’t it? But, it’s not. It can never be. As long as we have needs, we’ll have to deal with people we can’t stand from time to time. We’re losing that skill (if we haven’t already lost it), the one that lets us deal with strangers and tolerate their shrill voices and clunky senses of humor and body odor and squeaky shoes. So, what encounters do we have with the outside world, the world we can’t control, can  actually make us succumb to a screaming balls-busting spree.

#2. We don’t have enough annoying friends, either.

…More MoRe MORE…

Lots of us were born into towns full of people we couldn’t stand. Only perhaps the dysfunctional me… But anyhow as a kid, we may find ourselves in an elementary school classroom, packed in with 3 dozen kids we did not choose and who shared none of our tastes nor interests. Most probably you got bullied/beat up a lot.

But, we’ve grown up. And if we’re, say, a huge ( insert whatever… ) fan, we can go find their forum and meet a dozen people just like us. Or even better, start a private room with our favorite few and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who’s just… Well, different. That’s just another Old World inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a toilet or wait for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so we can wipe our asses with it.

The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if we think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can’t stand is society. Just people with opposite tastes and conflicting personalities sharing space and cooperating, often through gritted teeth.

Some time ago, we had to sit in an over crowded room to see a movie. We didn’t get to choose… We either sit down or we miss the movie. When we’ve got a new car, everyone on the block came and stood in your yard to look it over. You can bet that some of those people were assholes. Yet, on the whole, people back then were apparently happier in their jobs and more satisfied with their lives. And get this: They had more friends.

That’s right. Even though they had almost no ability to filter their peers according to common interests (hell, often you were just friends with the guy who happened to live next door), they still came up with more close friends than we have now-people they could trust.

It turns out, apparently, that after we get over that first irritation, after we shed our shell of “they listen to different music because they wouldn’t understand mine” superiority, there’s a sort of comfort in needing other people and being needed on a level beyond common interests. It turns out humans are social animals after all. And that ability to suffer fools, to tolerate annoyance, that’s literally the one single thing that allows us to function in a world populated by other people who aren’t us. Otherwise, we’ll turn emo. Science has proven it…

#3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate.

Well, nothing to do with this article at all…

I can never emphasize this enough but ah well…

I have this friend who uses the expression “No, thank you,” in a sarcastic way. To me, it means, “I’d rather be shot in the face.” She puts a little ironic lilt on the last two words that lets you know. You ask, “Hey, you wanna have some breakfast? I’m sooo hungry” And, she’ll say, “No, thank you.Sorry.”

So one day we had this exchange via text:

Me: “Hey, want me to come over and help (XXX) as promised?”

Her: “No, thank you. Sorry.”

That totally pissed me off. How can someone calls me when they need me and dump me when they don’t? Phuck OFF… (Hey, nobody likes to be taken for granted esspecially me) And, now my offer of service was dismissed with her bitchy catchphrase?

I didn’t speak to her for a month or 2. She finally looked me up and realized that the “No, thank you. Sorry” she replied with was not meant to be sarcastic, but was a literal, “No, but thank you for offering.” She was up for some personal matters(secret), it turns out. Kinda think of it, well she just used it 2 times out of well… I lost count. Nonetheless, I’ve no idea why I’m particularly pissed with “No,thank you”

So did we really need a study to tell us that more than 40 percent of what we say in text based messaging is misunderstood? Well, they did one anyway.

How many of our friends have we only spoken with online? If 40 percent of our personality has gotten lost in the text transition, do these people even really know us? The people who dislike us via text, on message boards or chatrooms or whatever, is it because we’re really so much against each other? Or, is it because of the misunderstood 40 percent? And, what about the ones who actually liked us?

Hell, my first argument with Yuri started with the word “Duh~” on Msn…Hahaha

Many of us try to make up that difference in sheer numbers, piling up sixty dozen friends on facebook. But here’s the problem …

#4. Online company are only making us lonelier…

When someone speaks to us face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? Take a guess.

It’s 7 percent. The other 93 percent is nonverbal, according to studies. No, I don’t know how they arrived at that exact number. They have a machine or something. But we didn’t need it. I mean, come on. Most of our humor is sarcasm, and sarcasm is just mismatching the words with the tone. Like my friend’s “No, thank you.”

You don’t wait for a girl to verbally tell you she likes you. It’s the sparkle in her eyes when you talk, her posture, the way she grabs your head and shoves your face into her boobs… Exaggerated

That’s the crux of the problem. That human ability to absorb the moods of others through that kind of subconscious osmosis is crucial. Kids born without “it” are considered mentally handicapped. People who have lots of “it” are called “charismatic” and become movie stars and politicians. It’s not what they say… it’s this energy they drawn upon themselves and put off that makes us feel good about ourselves.

When we’re living in MSN/Facebook World, all that is stripped away. Don’t we all notice the weird side effect to it? The absence a sense of the other person’s mood, every line we read gets filtered through our own mood instead. The reason I read my friend’s “No Thank You” message as sarcastic was because I was in an irritable mood. In that state of mind, I was eager to be offended. And worse, if I do enough of my communicating this way, my mood never changes. After all, people keep saying nasty things to me! Of course I’m depressed! It’s me against the world!

No, what I need is somebody to shake me by the shoulders and snap me out of it…  That which leads us to the next…

#5. We don’t get criticized enough.

Most of what sucks about not having close friends isn’t the missed birthday parties or the sad, single-player games of computer games. No, what sucks is the lack of real criticism.

In my time online I’ve been called “noob” approximately 30k times, “c*b*i” 20k times, “s*h*i” probably a few more times more that “c*b*i”. And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target to do any real mental harm. I’ve been insulted lots, but I’ve been criticized very little to none. And don’t ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates us making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog nonetheless. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing but truly helpful in the long run.

Tragically, we’re having lesser and lesser of those types of conversations. The interventions, the brutal honesty, the, “you know, everybody’s pissed off because of what you said last night, but nobody wants to say anything because they’re afraid of you,” sort of conversations. Those horrible, awkward, wrenchingly uncomfortable sessions that you can only have with someone who sees right to the center of you. Most of the time, we only engage in empty conversations… “You’re so cool… I’m so cool… I’ve been here, there, everywhere… Blah Blah Blah” Endless Blabbering and flattering and never ending suspicions where the only hypocritical reason to even continue those pointless conversation is “I don’t want to hurt you so we talk about other stuff other than the things we really need to talk about”

E-mail and texting are awesome tools for avoiding that level of honesty. With text, we can respond when we feel like it. We can measure our words. We can pick and choose which questions to answer. The person on the other end can’t see your face, can’t see you get nervous, can’t detect when you’re lying. You have almost total control and as a result that other person never sees past your armor, never sees you at your worst, never knows the embarrassing little things about yourself that you can’t control. Gone are the common quirks, humiliations and vulnerabilities that real friendships are built on.

Browse around people’s Facebook pages, look at the characters they create for themselves. If we’ve built a pool of friends via a blog/twitter (oops…), building ourselves up as a misunderstood, happy little angels that is so happening and all… It’s kind of hard to log on and talk about how you went to prom and how your date ditched you for another guy/girl. You never get to really be yourself, and that’s a very very lonely feeling…

And, on top of all that …

#6. We’re victims of the Outrage Machine.

A whole lot of the people still reading this are saying, “Of course I’m depressed! People are starving! Malaysia has turned into Nazi Africa! My parents watch retarded television shows and talk about them for hours afterwards! People are dying in meaningless wars all over the world!”

But how did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn’t live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common. In those days, if your buddy moved away the only way to communicate was with pen and paper and a stamp. We have N***b, but our grandparents had Japanese (which literally screwed every chinese in Malaysia). Some of your grandparents grew up at a time when nobody had air conditioning. All of their parents grew up without it.

.

.

We are physically better off today in every possible way in which such things can be measured … but we sure as hell wouldn’t know that if we’re getting our news online. Why?

Well, ask yourself: If some music site posts an article called, “Fall Out Boy is a Fine Band” and on the same day posts another one called, “Fall Out Boy is the Shittiest Fucking Band of the Last 100 Years, Say Experts,” which do you think will get the most traffic? The second one wins in a blowout. Outrage manufactures word-of-mouth.

The news blogs many of you read? The people running them know the same thing. Every site is in a dogfight for traffic (even if they don’t run ads, they still measure their success by the size of their audience) and so they carefully pick through the wires for the most inflammatory story possible. The other blogs start echoing the same story from the same point of view. If you want, you can surf all day and never swim out of the warm, stagnant waters of the “aren’t those bastards evil” pool.

This wasn’t as much a problem in the old days, of course. Some of us remember having only three channels on TV. That’s right. Three. We’re talking about the ’90s here. So there was something unifying in the way we all sat down to watch the same news, all of it coming from the same point of view. Even if the point of view was retarded and wrong, even if some stories went criminally unreported, we at least all shared it.

That’s over. There effectively is no “mass media” any more so, where before we disagreed because we saw the same news and interpreted it differently, now we disagree because we’re seeing completely different freaking news. When we can’t even agree on the basic facts, the differences become irreconcilable. That constant feeling of being at bitter odds with the rest of the world brings with it a tension that just builds and builds.

We humans used to have lots of natural ways to release that kind of angst. But these days… It’s just so tired… Exhausted, SPIN SPIN SPIN… This must stop…

#7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less.

There’s one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it’s one that nobody ever talks about:

They demand less from you.

Sure, you emotionally support them, comfort them after a breakup, maybe even talk them out of a suicide. But knowing someone in “meatspace”, “meatface” adds a whole, long list of annoying demands. Wasting our whole afternoon helping them fix their computer. Going to funerals with them. Toting them around in your car every day after to buy Christmas gifts for their friends. Having them show up unannounced when you were just settling in to watch the Dirty Jobs marathon on the Discovery channel, then mentioning how hungry they are until you finally give them half your sandwich.

You have so much more control in MSN, Facebook…

The problem is we are hard-wired by evolution to need to do things for people. Everybody for the last five thousand years seemed to realize this and then we suddenly forgot it in the last decade. We get suicidal teens and scramble to teach them self-esteem. Well, unfortunately, self-esteem and the ability to like yourself only come after you’ve done something that makes you likable. We can’t bullshit ourselves. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking CocaCola and playing video games one-handed because he’s masturbating with the other one, what will I think of myself if I do the same thing?

You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for your mom and dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter. Grow a damn plant.

It ain’t rocket science… We are a social animal and thus we are born with little happiness hormones that are released into our bloodstream when we see a physical benefit to our actions. Think about all those teenagers in their dark rooms, glued to their PC’s, turning every life problem into ridiculous melodrama. Why do they make those cuts on their arms? It’s because making the pain-and subsequent healing-tangible releases endorphins they don’t get otherwise. It’s pain, but at least it’s real.

That form of stress relief via mild discomfort used to be part of our daily lives, via our routine of hunting gazelles and gathering berries and climbing rocks and fighting bears. No more. This is why office jobs make so many of us miserable… We don’t get any physical, tangible result from our work. But do construction out in the hot sun for two months, and for the rest of your life you can drive past a certain house and say, “Holy shit, I built that.” Maybe that’s why mass shootings are more common in offices than construction sites. LOL?

It’s the kind of physical, dirt-under-your-nails satisfaction that you can only get by turning off the computer, going outdoors and re-connecting with the real world. Like Gunung Ledang… “I climbed that”… That feeling, that “I built that” or “I grew that” or “I fed that guy” or “I made these pants” feeling…

Those feelings can NEVER EVER be matched by ANYTHING the internet has to offer.