This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

by Mlissa | Sep 28, 2016 | Wordy Wednesday

Social media. it’s a pain in the ass. It’s in our collective faces 24/7. It never shuts off or shuts up. It never takes a nap or a time out. It never earns it’s keep. It’s just… It’s become our source of warped truth, of vindication, of revenge, of mud-slinging, of endless commercials.

Every company uses social media. Twitter followers. Facebook likes. LinkedIn connections. Google Plus…(I haven’t figured out what this one is for yet). Instagram and Snapchat and Periscope so every second of every day can be recorded and posted for the world to see.

Life isn’t richer because of social media. Instead, it’s much more shallow. It’s a soap opera. It’s high school some days and jr. high on others. It’s I’m better than you and I’m going to prove it. It’s cliques and bullies and petty bullshit. It’s hate and my opinion is better/strong/more right than yours. And lately, it’s become a place to draw even more lines in the sand between the haves and have nots, the racists and the ones trying to forward a movement, the open-minded and the shriveled up and died minded.

There are instances of good. But it’s the bad that seems to win out on social media most of the time and rise to the top.

It’s given some a sense of power and prestige and a voice that is used more often to exclude than to include, to hurt, to malign.

I don’t want any part of it. I’m tired of the stress of it and stressful it is. And the worst of all? Facebook. Sure Twitter gets bad, but Facebook is a fucking pit in the worse neighborhoods of Hell. I’m over it. I post what I want, which isn’t much. I check my profile, the groups I’m in, and my Page roughly twice a day. That’s the extent of my involvement anymore. The newsfeed is hate and baiting, whether it’s race baiting or click bating. It’s people trying to tell others how to live, what opinion to have, what is and isn’t acceptable in the romance writing world,what is and isn’t acceptable to do for their family, and what posts they can or can’t comment on based on whether they’re black or white. Seriously? This is what we are? This is what we’ve become?

Sadly, yes. It is.

And this is why I’ve removed myself from it but for very limited involvement. The negativity, the stress, the hate, the drama, the racism. There’s enough of it in the outside the computer world. Except, I don’t see it in the interactions of actual human beings when I’m out in public, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not like I see it online.

This kind of vitriol is not bringing anyone together. It’s tearing us apart. It’s making us weaker, not stronger. It’s bringing out the worst in us, not the better.

Life is too short. We’ve seen it. We know it. It plays out every second of every day on social media, on 24/7 news channels, on event alerts on our phones and tablets. But as a society, we’d rather fight than work to find a way to live together and revel and learn through our differences.

How fucking sad and pathetic we’ve become.

This is why we can’t have nice things. And dammit… I want nice things.

~lissa