Deathstreaming Live

As I lay on my bed to sleep every night, I think a lot about death. I think about how I and everyone I know will die at some point and there's not a thing anyone can do about it. It is inevitable and you never really know when exactly it's going to happen.

Like everyone, I hope my death is quick and painless. That's the best anyone can hope for. However, in this information age, there should be one more thing to add - that our death won't be uploaded on the internet. 

Nowadays everyone has a camera on their phone. Social media is full of photos of people acting like the banality of their lives is worth broadcasting to the whole world and be kept on record for all eternity. When something out of the ordinary happens, you better believe a mass of idiots are gonna whip out their phones and start recording. A baby could be bleeding to death on the sidewalk and it's perfectly reasonable that a segment of the population is going to think of recording it first instead of doing anything helpful.

This was a problem long before social media and has only become worse with technology. Newspapers love to splatter their front page with as much blood as they can get away with. Nobody questions how morbid and tasteless that is. Now,  could you imagine dying in public and the last thing you see is some asshole shoving his phone in your face? All you end up being is fodder to get likes and traffic on some website? 

So what does it matter if you're dead anyway? That's a fair point but it's not about the deceased, it's about the people left behind, the people who actually cared about him. I doubt anyone wants to see the corpse of their child put up on websites for all to gawk at and comment on. Nobody wants to see the deaths of their friends and family playing on a perpetual loop in cyberspace. But alas, that's the world we live in now. Nobody really cares about hurt feelings. There's no privacy, not even in death.

Quick, painless, and anonymous.

Digital Noise

If twitter were a person, it would be a confused, gender-obsessed, bipolar teenager who is either screeching about the latest outrage du jour or slobbering over the newest K-POP song. I saw The Social Dilemma, a documentary about the evils of social media. You don't need a show to confirm what sane people already know; that social media is the devil. I know that's rich coming from a blog.

There is truth though, that social media is ruining us. Spend some time on the internet and it seems like the world is burning. It's easy to feel angry or afraid. There's plenty of bad news to go around. Just take your pick, you'll find plenty of online articles predicting your apocalypse of choice. But that's no way to live, no? 

If I may be so bold as to offer advice, I say that when the world seems so vast and scary, just shrink it and it will seem less so. When you hear something bad, really stop to think about whether or not it affects you. Why get worked up about wildfires in California when you live in some island in the Philippines? Some guy said a bad thing on the internet? You don't know him and was he even talking about you? Is there some cause you champion or at least, pretend to? Check yourself and think about whether some righteously indignant tweet is really gonna change the world. Even if there is something happening that seems important, are you even in a position to change it? Why give up your soul energy, piss yourself off and put yourself in a bad mood for all that?

We're being played. Man was not meant to live like this. Man was not meant to give a shit about so many things. Throughout most of human history, human beings have only cared about the little podunk village they were born in and no further than that. Scientifically speaking, a man can only give so much of a shit, three rat's asses worth at most. Our ability to give a damn is not infinite, otherwise it would be a mental illness. There is value in not caring, even if it makes you seem mean to other people talking about the latest bowel movements on the trending page. Life is full of irrelevant things aggressively trying to grab your attention with all their digital noise.

It's OK to not care. 

Shrink the world and you'll discover the things you really should care about and the things you can actually do. Why whine about some injustice happening a million miles away when you just had a fight with your loved one and should fix that instead? You know what I mean? All these outrages are just distractions keeping you from seeing the things that really matter.

I know this will sound cruel but I don't care that Chadwick Boseman died. I'm sure he was a fine person and it's a bad thing that he died. Trust me, I know watching someone die of cancer is one of the worst things in the world, but I didn't know him personally. I didn't watch Black Panther and I'm unfamiliar with his body of work. Sure, I might watch one of his movies if I felt like it since everyone says he was a good actor but I don't expect me to tweet "Rest in peace, king..." or go on dishonestly about how he touched my life by putting on a cat-themed costume in a dumb billion dollar comic book movie.

Fucking whatever.