“It saddens me that you do not support this”… a dear friend blurted out in agony when she asked my views on a recent trending topic… For a moment, just out of affection for my friend, my mind was about to give up, please her sensibilities and spin a story on how I was deeply affected as well by that current social media viral… but it was too late… having been friends for so long, she had wisened up to such lying… so well, you see my honesty on this matter has survived because of the wisdom of my friend, more than mine 🙂
Anyways, the reality is that I think the campaigns and the things that go viral on social media are really that… a viral… a virus… an infection… a malady… that affects people without their knowledge and intent… And in many ways…
Lets start with the first… Fever is symptom of an underlying disease, but we end up trying to cure the symptom first… the same way, most people who get in contact with this social viral bugs, end up feeling the heat once it comes from their known acquaintances & they respond driven by that heat rather than actually having the underlying condition…
I do not mean to say that all people who spread the viral hash tags (in social media platforms, words that follow #, for the sane people who still have not fallen for this traps) are all faking it just to be seen as cool and part of the group with their other acquaintances… in the masked population of the internet world, many certainly are faking it for sure… But we as human’s are instinctively driven to find comforts in groups… so even when many are not overtly manipulating this in their actions, quite a few are instinctively driven to join – especially when supporting and sharing the tags has no cost what so ever other than a few key strokes on the mobile, laptop or computer… but the cost of not doing so is the one of being left out…
Still this in the heat, part of the group mentality does not cover everyone…
That brings me to the second one… The ones who see others having the real disease and start developing one themselves just by looking at it…
There is an old Cherokee Indian story which says that there are two wolves within us, one good and one bad… and the one that wins is the one that we feed… And a lot of that feed today is the social media and internet feed… we are affected by what we read, see and hear… there is a saying that if you are off the media/internet for a few weeks, you will suddenly feel that the world has become a better place…
There are many who start believing that they are really affected by the cause either by the constant bombarding on their screens… or even getting exposed once if they have a sensitive mind… The smallest of incidents – direct or indirect, in the near past or in a time long long ago… all start getting recollected via that prism and lo and behold… there are more joiners in the campaign… I feel bad and equally angry at this set of people as compared to the first ones… bad because they are almost hallucinating something out of perspective and getting their personal lives needlessly affected… and angry because this kinds are the ones who get really passionate about the campaigns as it becomes personal to them…
The first ones are passerbys who will click selfies at a disaster site and post them on social media with an image of a candle for a prayer next to it just on social media… But the second ones share the stories of their grandparents who are long dead and then at times stand in front of monuments as well with real candles…
The truth however is… that if your story of ghosts (however big or small they were) of another life have been put to rest, there is no need for them to be rekindled just because someone, somewhere had that experience right now… That not all your experiences have the same perspective and intensity as the context of the current viral… that if without the viral feed, your life was going on fine and you were not thinking about the subject… then you really should not be affected by it as much…
The last kinds… and for this one I am truly sorry for… are the ones who are pressurised to join against their will just to maintain relationships… and they consciously do out of pressure… the first and the second ones do not realize that by their actions they are putting unconscious or conscious pressure on the sane ones who really have other things to do in life…
For example, I love one of my many uncle’s very much… but he complained to me one day – that I never reply to his chat messages… and you know what that were… a forward every morning telling me good morning in a different way… he felt hurt and he stopped… he spoke about it again the next time we met and told me that I do not seem to even miss them now… I apologised and told him that I did read them (a lie), but am not good at responding… and they have started coming in again at dawn for me… If my friend would not have been wise enough to let me be the way I am, maybe ‘me too’ would have been part of the viral that she felt passionate about…
But the fact is that I do not really disagree with the causes… just that I do not feel strongly for every cause out there… and every second month something new does come up and for all of which I will not feel strongly either… and many out there on the internet hopefully are also like me…
So as an irony… lets make this viral with #NotReallyMyCause 🙂
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