Just writing

A bug's life, Sad Makeup, social media, connection, and nature

I have pretty much quit social media since my dearest Dara became a spirit puppy. Only picking it up for messaging a few friends of whom I don’t have any other shared messaging apps with. Then it progressed to checking on certain shops or companies for their opening hours because that’s where all the information is these days. Then then recently the void of social media has opened up again, warping my face, attention, and time into its endless dopamine-fuelled rage, numbness, and distraction. Enabling me to lie to myself that “liking” this post would make a difference, that “liking” this post would be equivalent to petting this dog, that “liking” this post is a helping hand, and maybe it is, maybe it is better than doing nothing. Then then then donned with this excuse I would scroll more and more for the “right” posts. The difference between before and after my Dara has been anointed with the virtue of becoming a spirit dog is that since then things celebrities or popular media feel aimless and dull like a sugar coated sugar. No essence whatsoever. Given the tragedies worldwide and the maddening complicity and denial as if what we learned from history is to repeat history, it does put a spectacular spotlight that these glamorous lives can’t be more irrelevant and instead feels like an insult to injury. Or even hearing of friends or those I know one way or the others’ lives that come gift-wrapped because of our self-consciousness and this strange feeling of need that we must giftwrap ourselves to be presentable. Yes, some of these contents are beautiful, wonderfully-intended, artful if not art. But I would rather hear it directly from these people, then I would be interested, then it would be and feel real. It wipes my brain, this smart phone. As if it’s a parasite gaining its strength and intelligence through sucking out what I have in mine. We usually swat at mosquitoes, but with social media, with digital devices, we seem to need constant skin to skin validation. Something that can be beautiful, a genuine tool for connection, a platform for arts, but the way it is being promoted if not forced upon is through addiction. That’s the problem. And like with all addictive substances, it creates monopoly, it creates an exclusive few individuals with god-like power.

In the past two weeks or so, time feels like it flows through my fingers. I blink and it’s late afternoon, I exhale and it’s two days later, I finally sit down and it’s been one day short of being a week. No matter how tired or exhausted, I can’t seem to fall asleep until late. I feel certain feelings, because of the Banshees sometimes I have to distract myself from going to bed, so as one does, I turn to social media. Even whilst writing this post, I opened it and scrolled for-. Do I even remember what contents I looked at? When time already has been feeling as if it’s slipping through my fingers, here I am voluntarily warping myself into the void.