PreyDators

This goes out to each and every teenager, and millennial on this planet. Consider it a letter from Santa, and hear me out. Also, each word of this article applies to me as well, I’m not writing this from on top of my high horse.

You know, it’s strange, each one of us wants to create something, all of us want to be revolutionaries. Yet we sit around and settle for just fitting in. We feed on likes, comments and re-tweets. We get intoxicated with the idea of being admired by a bunch of people that we don’t even know. Our childhood and our adolescent phase of life, is being blurred by the illusion that social media growth counts as real attention and popularity.

We’re all validation junkies, and that needs to change. We think that being sleep-deprived and ignorant makes us some kind of cool. Ask yourself, when was the last time you were true to yourself when you posted on Instagram. We’re a naïve bunch of pubescents talking about being broken, and the sad part is, it’s getting more real every-time we say it. We have good days and bad days, everyone does. The difference is we’re so obsessively blown away by likes and comments and other people’s opinions, that they define every minute of our being.

I know how hard it is to accept it, but I’m going to do it, by just talking about myself right now. I’m affected by what people have to say about me. I fear being judged for what I put out into the new digital version of the universe. On the contrary, I too judge people based on their Instagram. It’s the most hypocritical thing.

Now coming to the bigger picture, today we stand up for, and talk about sensitive issues, mostly about some sort of discrimination. I don’t know why others stand up for it. I know why I do though. It’s very simple, I want to be a part of a world where people live and let live. Where we all co-exist, where individuality is respected.

The reasons above, they’ve become a huge fallacy, because we’ve created discrimination at the largest scale. The new divide in society is online, followers are the new form of money, the new form of superiority. I believe that being lonely is a lot more liberating now, since it’s the only space where we aren’t pretending. We hate being lonely though, because it gets us back to the life, we are physically leading. That’s because we’re letting reality slip off our fingers so rapidly, that we don’t know how to pick up where we left off.

The title symbolises how we are the preys of our own actions, hence being the predators as well. We don’t know who to trust anymore, because each one of us has a manipulative individual growing up inside us, that only knows how to sacrifice anything to gain more validation. We tag people on our posts, so that they comment, we know it’s not genuine, yet we let it happen, we keep playing the same game. We’re tearing ourselves apart. Furthermore, we’re making it impossible for us to develop even a hint of genuine respect for someone, and just getting stuck in the same vicious cycle of putting each other down. We don’t realise it, but showing off our likes and followers is our version of the arms race. It’s causing a war.

This article lacks a happy ending, and it’s kind of like the emptiness we feel in the pit of our belly without our phones or any form of constant validation. However, it’s a milder version of the latter.

Best Regards,

Kabir Chatterjee