😶‍🌫️ irony poisoning?

I'm not sure how to go about this blank page, it's surely not the supposed fear of oversharing with you people since I've already done enough of it on the social media apps to have any sort of shame about it.

Perhaps it's the fact that I still have no clue why I'm writing this? At best it seems self indulgent, at worst it's rather irrelevant.👀

This is simply a miscellany of things I've had in mind past week;

I think this has been a problem at a much earlier age than I realised where I have built this sort of a network, internal system of peripherals almost, which slotted into place just so, and if one of them went squiffy, they all did, just like dominoes.🙂

Yes, things aren't always so black and white, but as they say, easier said than done. Catastrophising isn't really a choice, personally at least.

This is a safe place to collectively overthink and sulk.🐸

Remember when we were little and sending out postcards over holidays used to be a thing? Since past couple years my holiday season's been anything but eventful — With time I stopped sending out holiday postcards too because I could just not get that perfect holiday picture to put up on the postcards. It took me a while to realise that not every holiday season is meant to be exciting. Each postcard has two sides, and we tend to solitarily focus on the image we present to others when your story matters a lot more than the front side. In today's worldview, social media is simply all about curating a perfect life — showing that you are having the best time in real life, everything has to be 'pinterest-y' and while there's nothing wrong with it, (considering I myself am one of those people) the problem is that we seem to have forgotten the importance of stories. When was the last time someone sat you down to tell you about all the exciting things they did recently? Is storytelling a lost art? 👉🏼👈🏼

I miss what Instagram used to be in its initial days. When everyone shared goofy, plain pictures without hesitation. You go out for lunch with friends? Great, let's click a pic and post. You see a pretty tree? That's one for the gram. Lately, my Instagram feed is almost exclusively reels/pictures from content creators, all heavily curated & edited of course. None of the actual pictures from friends that you signed up to see. The interactions you used to have in the initial stages, commenting on your friends' post, all of it is non-existent at this point. At the most, you 'like' someone's post or story. And if it's a close friend/an important story, you perhaps send across a dm/comment.

Internet used to be an escape from reality, now reality seems to be an escape from the internet. As a matter of fact, not just the internet but ever since commercialisation of creatives has become a thing, every form of media is soiled with negativity to some extent. 🤌🏼

During his interview for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell says, "The literary world has committed suicide." continually he says, "They've essentially created a critical infrastructure whose function it is to warn people off reading."

I'm not vehemently anti-negative culture in the literary world — As an avid Insta user who consistently updates all my inner thoughts throughout lockdown, how could I be?

As a matter of fact it isn't just the literary world, it's human nature, we've all developed a 'negativity bias' — meaning we have a tendency to give more importance to the negative events than positive/neutral. According to a Pew Research study, this generation is more polarised, more divided than ever. Blaming the internet culture for this entirely wouldn't be appropriate, but to some extend it is responsible.

In her book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes:

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely — my partner does: he thought #tbt meant "truth be told" for ages — you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism's last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies internet language talks a lot more about this in her book 'Because Internet' and well, besides the fact that most of us have lost the ability to speak like a normal person without the crutch of the world wide web infiltrating our vocabulary, post-pandemic, we've definitely gotten relatively a lot less empathetic too — This isn't the new normal, or the old normal, it's something worse.

The new art of dark absurdism, for instance, euphemistically referencing the act of dying as 'unalive', is strange. Or as they call it 'irony poisoning' — in simple words where ones conception of the outside world's foundation is through memes and pop culture references. Whilst this humour isn't meant to disrespect anyone essentially, it does one desensitise the subject, two warps your ability to separate your perception of real world from the internet, which isn't okay specially for those who are being newly exposed to media.

On a side note, without any critical thought, the irony of me semi-negatively writing about 'irony poisoning' is apparent lol.

Maybe we should all just become rocks? :p

and ending this with irony for the dramatic effect