Dearest readers, whether we want to or not, most of us have to get serious again. Summer is over, time to get more work done than usual- whether it's hitting the books or doing more work while looking less out the window or browsing for overpriced weekend getaway packages. When we get all serious like this, we tend to feel like we want something in return- perhaps more stability in our relationships. We want family, significant others, friends and businesses we deal with to be more reliable so we get a sense of what our interactions will be like in our immediate future and how our days will go. Increasingly, this has been difficult in the superficially connected world. Flaking out, ghosting and now subwaying are symptoms of a much deeper social problem, and it really looks like some of the communication and social media apps we use have made it way, way worse. Let's look at the how and the why of it, together with some advice on how to do better and ask other people around you to do better so all of us can have a better day to day life.
First, there's flaking out- a phenomenon that has been around much longer than ghosting or subwaying. We've all done it, or others have done that to us. At this point, I think most of us have built up a certain amount of tolerance for it. However, it is not nearly as socially stigmatized as it should be (it wastes time, the most valuable currency in the world), and there is no generally accepted upper limit of how much flakiness you should take from someone before you temporarily or permanently cut them off. This, dearest readers, is a problem. It wastes time of both the person who flakes out and the person who gets flaked out, it erodes trust and can ruin a person's ability to maximize what they can do in a day to move up in life or simply keep their spot- especially in increasingly competitive urban hubs. How have apps made this worse? First, they made it easier for people to keep a distance between each other, which in turn led to decrease of empathy; anything that decreases your empathy for others leads you to a more psychopathic state of thinking and acting. People communicate with each other more and more simply through text and by following each others' social media feeds. Communicating through text, however, is the bigger problem here. You read text, see some gifs and emojis and that's about it. No voice, no seeing each other. Unless you already have a strong connection in real life and see someone on a regular basis (family, friend, s/o, business), they're not real. You cannot possibly have empathy for lines of text sprinkled with emojis and gifs. If you disagree, than how come it's easier for people to break up or deliver other bad news by text than by phone? Having access to that option, at all times, made it an attractive and increasingly acceptable way to do so. Sure, no one has ever liked delivering bad news and the consequences of being the messenger haha. However, it is a necessary part of life. Over time, you toughen up and become better at it. It's not something that comes naturally, so you need practice. Now, here's where we get a fork in the road. When you toughen up about flaking out on people and being flaked out on and you still have empathy for them, you will work on getting your house in order and being less flaky. When you have less or no empathy for someone (and this state of mind is amplified by using apps all the time), you will still toughen up but you will not make an effort to become less flaky at all; you will just keep losing people and keep having to find new ones.
Next up, ghosting. According to Oxford dictionary, ghosting is "the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication." More and more of us are doing this or have had it done to us in the past. It actually feels way worse than someone flaking out on you because it's a sudden, abrupt end of either a friendship or a relationship. Yep, it appears cruel and it sucks. Unlike flaking out, however, this phenomenon is somewhat new, or at least was not nearly as common in the past to get any spotlight in the media and the public eye. It was born out of heavy use of messaging and social media apps. The use of messaging apps and the way they limit our empathy are certainly to blame for stoking the flames here, but with ghosting in particular I think that social media apps are more to blame. Social media apps, as well as YouTube and let's say dating apps, have pumped unprecedented amount of constantly updating content and novelty in our daily lives. It used to be optimistic to think that there's something or someone new and exciting right around the corner and you had to wait for that something or someone. Now, it's all the time, everywhere, and everyone. Yep, very esoteric but true. Unless you can resist and get a grip of the objective reality of the human condition- the fact that time is passing, you are getting older and you will eventually die- you are pushed to sit back and constantly spectate, hit Next, swipe left or right, roll the dice as it were. In such a world, it becomes easier to lose sight of people in front of you and in your immediate surroundings who can make your life so much better. You lose sight, you lose some or all of your empathy. Then, before you know it, it's ghosting time. However, that is only one side of the ghosting coin. The other side is the problem of social media harassment and bullying. There are all sorts of people out there, and sometimes you cannot tell who is good and who is bad for you until you friend them or date them for a period of time. If they end up being bad for you, and they have some really pissy personality traits, you kind of have to ghost them. If you face them and tell them it's over, they can throw a temper tantrum of epic proportions and take it to social media to try and make your life miserable. This, dearest readers, is an actual option because of social media apps and would never happen otherwise. Also, the people who make personal matters public on social media are losing touch with reality, and reality has always been that personal stuff should not be a matter of public discussion at least 80 percent of the time. It does not take a village to deal with a breakup between two people.
Finally, there is subwaying- a term that describes people who are mostly casually dating and one person is taking forever to answer a text, as if they were in a tunnel for a day or three haha. Yep, that is also annoying as hell and tends to shake people's foundation and self-confidence. Also, some of us have done it or had this done to us. Again, as in the previous two examples, messaging apps, social media and dating apps have given birth to this phenomenon, and then seriously amplified it as well. Lack of empathy, heavy spectating and constantly rolling the dice on someone new around the corner are all there. I think this is transforming more and more people out there into individuals trying to manage an impossible number of friendships and intimate partners to the point where subwaying people is the only way to stay sane. Of course, an easier way to stay sane would be not to do it at all.
So, dearest readers, we come to the point where we ask ourselves the most important questions. Why are we doing this? Why are we getting more and more sick? Why do we flake out, ghost and subway? Why do we hyper-friend, hyper-date, hyper-spectate, hyper-hustle? I think this is because many of us, especially in large urban hubs, are living increasingly precarious lives compared to the earlier post-WW2 generations. Many people either do not own anything of appreciating value, or own way too little compared to previous generations of the same age. We feel compelled to brand ourselves and live Machiavellian lives as if it was the only way left in this world to become successful or merely have a good life. People with proper, full-time careers and good salaries are pillars of society and a country's economy, yet something out there is trying to shape us to work against maintaining a fertile ground for that to be even possible. You cannot build strong businesses, great careers and mutually enriching bonds on the foundation of flakiness, ghosting, subwaying and hell, let's throw it in, the gig economy. I wonder if the systems that are trying to make all of us live this way ever model how they will continue to exist when there is no next generation to fuel them because it never came to life...
If you feel you got caught up in all this a little too much, dearest readers, just stop for a day on a weekend and take stock of how you have been acting over the last while (weeks, months, years). Try to focus on what you can really do, who you can really keep in your life, and focus on those things and people the most. Add more people to your life very carefully, and have a clear, open and honest line of communication with them. And of course, if you feel the negative effects of messaging apps and social media creep up on you again...
First, there's flaking out- a phenomenon that has been around much longer than ghosting or subwaying. We've all done it, or others have done that to us. At this point, I think most of us have built up a certain amount of tolerance for it. However, it is not nearly as socially stigmatized as it should be (it wastes time, the most valuable currency in the world), and there is no generally accepted upper limit of how much flakiness you should take from someone before you temporarily or permanently cut them off. This, dearest readers, is a problem. It wastes time of both the person who flakes out and the person who gets flaked out, it erodes trust and can ruin a person's ability to maximize what they can do in a day to move up in life or simply keep their spot- especially in increasingly competitive urban hubs. How have apps made this worse? First, they made it easier for people to keep a distance between each other, which in turn led to decrease of empathy; anything that decreases your empathy for others leads you to a more psychopathic state of thinking and acting. People communicate with each other more and more simply through text and by following each others' social media feeds. Communicating through text, however, is the bigger problem here. You read text, see some gifs and emojis and that's about it. No voice, no seeing each other. Unless you already have a strong connection in real life and see someone on a regular basis (family, friend, s/o, business), they're not real. You cannot possibly have empathy for lines of text sprinkled with emojis and gifs. If you disagree, than how come it's easier for people to break up or deliver other bad news by text than by phone? Having access to that option, at all times, made it an attractive and increasingly acceptable way to do so. Sure, no one has ever liked delivering bad news and the consequences of being the messenger haha. However, it is a necessary part of life. Over time, you toughen up and become better at it. It's not something that comes naturally, so you need practice. Now, here's where we get a fork in the road. When you toughen up about flaking out on people and being flaked out on and you still have empathy for them, you will work on getting your house in order and being less flaky. When you have less or no empathy for someone (and this state of mind is amplified by using apps all the time), you will still toughen up but you will not make an effort to become less flaky at all; you will just keep losing people and keep having to find new ones.
Next up, ghosting. According to Oxford dictionary, ghosting is "the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication." More and more of us are doing this or have had it done to us in the past. It actually feels way worse than someone flaking out on you because it's a sudden, abrupt end of either a friendship or a relationship. Yep, it appears cruel and it sucks. Unlike flaking out, however, this phenomenon is somewhat new, or at least was not nearly as common in the past to get any spotlight in the media and the public eye. It was born out of heavy use of messaging and social media apps. The use of messaging apps and the way they limit our empathy are certainly to blame for stoking the flames here, but with ghosting in particular I think that social media apps are more to blame. Social media apps, as well as YouTube and let's say dating apps, have pumped unprecedented amount of constantly updating content and novelty in our daily lives. It used to be optimistic to think that there's something or someone new and exciting right around the corner and you had to wait for that something or someone. Now, it's all the time, everywhere, and everyone. Yep, very esoteric but true. Unless you can resist and get a grip of the objective reality of the human condition- the fact that time is passing, you are getting older and you will eventually die- you are pushed to sit back and constantly spectate, hit Next, swipe left or right, roll the dice as it were. In such a world, it becomes easier to lose sight of people in front of you and in your immediate surroundings who can make your life so much better. You lose sight, you lose some or all of your empathy. Then, before you know it, it's ghosting time. However, that is only one side of the ghosting coin. The other side is the problem of social media harassment and bullying. There are all sorts of people out there, and sometimes you cannot tell who is good and who is bad for you until you friend them or date them for a period of time. If they end up being bad for you, and they have some really pissy personality traits, you kind of have to ghost them. If you face them and tell them it's over, they can throw a temper tantrum of epic proportions and take it to social media to try and make your life miserable. This, dearest readers, is an actual option because of social media apps and would never happen otherwise. Also, the people who make personal matters public on social media are losing touch with reality, and reality has always been that personal stuff should not be a matter of public discussion at least 80 percent of the time. It does not take a village to deal with a breakup between two people.
Finally, there is subwaying- a term that describes people who are mostly casually dating and one person is taking forever to answer a text, as if they were in a tunnel for a day or three haha. Yep, that is also annoying as hell and tends to shake people's foundation and self-confidence. Also, some of us have done it or had this done to us. Again, as in the previous two examples, messaging apps, social media and dating apps have given birth to this phenomenon, and then seriously amplified it as well. Lack of empathy, heavy spectating and constantly rolling the dice on someone new around the corner are all there. I think this is transforming more and more people out there into individuals trying to manage an impossible number of friendships and intimate partners to the point where subwaying people is the only way to stay sane. Of course, an easier way to stay sane would be not to do it at all.
So, dearest readers, we come to the point where we ask ourselves the most important questions. Why are we doing this? Why are we getting more and more sick? Why do we flake out, ghost and subway? Why do we hyper-friend, hyper-date, hyper-spectate, hyper-hustle? I think this is because many of us, especially in large urban hubs, are living increasingly precarious lives compared to the earlier post-WW2 generations. Many people either do not own anything of appreciating value, or own way too little compared to previous generations of the same age. We feel compelled to brand ourselves and live Machiavellian lives as if it was the only way left in this world to become successful or merely have a good life. People with proper, full-time careers and good salaries are pillars of society and a country's economy, yet something out there is trying to shape us to work against maintaining a fertile ground for that to be even possible. You cannot build strong businesses, great careers and mutually enriching bonds on the foundation of flakiness, ghosting, subwaying and hell, let's throw it in, the gig economy. I wonder if the systems that are trying to make all of us live this way ever model how they will continue to exist when there is no next generation to fuel them because it never came to life...
If you feel you got caught up in all this a little too much, dearest readers, just stop for a day on a weekend and take stock of how you have been acting over the last while (weeks, months, years). Try to focus on what you can really do, who you can really keep in your life, and focus on those things and people the most. Add more people to your life very carefully, and have a clear, open and honest line of communication with them. And of course, if you feel the negative effects of messaging apps and social media creep up on you again...