Why Everything is Awful and You’re Probably Going to Die

Every morning Betsy and I wake up and check the people news. By people news I mean Twitter, Instagram and for Betsy, Facebook. I’m not on Facebook (which makes me morally superior in some way) and talk about who’s doing what in the world.

There are two things we can count on every morning.

The first is picture’s of her baby sister (Betsy is the oldest of seven. Her parents adopted an overly cute baby last year) to which we will comment or tweet back “so cute”. I might as well have “so cute” on auto reply for anything sent to me by Betsy’s family. It would always be the appropriate response.

The second thing we can count on is a sling of twitter absolutes.

A twitter absolute is a phrase or statement presented as an infallible law that, upon further examination, is neither provable or remotely true. And yet we all fall for them.

Twitter absolutes work best when they’re associated with some sort of fatal threat.

For instance:

“Too much thinking about yourself is a path to isolation.” Of course this all sounds wise and knowing and vaguely true, but if you think about it, it’s logically absurd. Everybody loves a good narcissist, after all. They have lots of friends.

And even if they don’t, they’re fine because they haven’t figured out people don’t like them. Hardly a path to isolation.

Not only this, the saying is presented as a law. But it’s not a law.

Context is everything.

I think the issue here is people like to have little truths they can cling to to give themselves a sense of security, and we are willing to believe them for the security, not because they actually make sense. It’s true that life feels like a game or a contest and it’s something people are trying to win. And games have rules. The more we know the rules the more we can feel like we are winning. Ooooh, that last sentence would make a good tweet, actually.

In my humble opinion (okay, not so humble. There’s nothing humble about blogging your opinions. Can we just agree on that?) I think we’re getting a little black and white in our thinking and a little dramatic in the results we’re pitching.

The sure way to get somebody to agree with you is to over-dramatize the fallout if they don’t.

I read Betsy a tweet this morning that said:

“The more your career is about you, the faster it will self destruct.” Really? I mean it’s a nice thought that points us toward a more selfless perspective, but is that really a law? I wanted to tweet “the more your life is about your dog the faster your dog will explode” just to see if people would retweet it.

Anyway, Betsy and I don’t buy into the little sayings anymore. We think it’s a lot of drama. Or to put it more accurately, “believing little sayings is a slow path to a lonely and isolated death.”

Absolutely. Write that one in the margins of your journal.