There is something deeply disturbing about the validation required by many today.
Did we eat the right food, say the right thing, buy the right product, look good doing it?
While not completely worthless–it is very rare when something can be designated in such a manner–social media is pretty close. Do we really need to say things to an audience of people that we for the most part do not know or honestly even care about?
Do you really care about Roger Jones, that dude you never talked to in 4th through 12th grade, but now 20 years later like each other’s posts about grilled cheese and babies?
Admittedly, there must be something biological that occurs when we post snippets of our lives on social media platforms. It sort of feels good. Yeah, our lives rock, our kids are too cute, our knowledge is too stellar.
It is crap. It really is a bunch of crap. There is something to be said for living within one’s own mind and heart and the parameters of a life you created with your own hands. A life that can be turned off or erased, which is entirely the case with social media, is not real.
The time we spend updating people we do not know, care about, or possible even like, can perhaps better be spent on the people with whom we work, love, or trying to love, etc.
There is an emptiness to social media, a puffing up of the proverbial chest, a step back into our primordial minds in which we must have sought validation wherever we could.
Validation cannot be bought, sold, or offered through video screens. Rather, it is an experience inside one’s mind, earned through breathing, letting go, crying, making mistakes, quitting jobs, landing them, giving birth, saying goodbye, falling down and getting up.
Social media validates itself–that is all it does. It validates technology and the sadness we feel, but rarely express…