GRATITUDE

Out of the Fog

And into the frying pan

In the three weeks I was out of action, I was as useful as a dead sea urchin.

After moving around like a car with three wheels on reserve fuel, it’s nice to be out of the brain fog and resume writing. I took a much needed break to focus on health and this included setting aside writing. I have my seasons when I can write nothing. Not out of inspiration. I just don’t feel moved to express myself. This was one of them.

I make a good patient in the sense I don’t fuss or put up a fight against taking care of myself. I surrender to the God of Rest and indulge in the pleasure and luxury of my bed. In moments of such submission, I stop and admire my bedding’s thread count, rubbing my feet against my chinchilla blanket topped by a plush duvet. The best things in life are indeed what constitute good bedding and all the space in between.

I relished being in my warm cocoon. I get up, shower, eat and go back to rest. I’m 47, I know my body well enough to know when it’s good for nothing, not even for coffee. I’m a slug without a shell, just stuck to a pot.

There really was no other place I’d rather be than on my bed, in my room, in calmness, entertained by videos made by random strangers. Pardon me, content creators, they’re called.

I typically don’t indulge in social media. While I was down and out of sorts, I did. Of course it’s everything folks describe it to be, but I also learned a few things, including life hacks and new tricks.

Not everything about social media is bad. Just 98% of it. As I scrolled and amused myself, I begged the question: Was social media invented just to bring out all the mentally ill people from behind the shadows?”

It’s interesting how folks try to connect with the world in many ways I wouldn’t have the guts and temerity to do. But my joy was less on the video. I was amused by the comments posted by others. It’s a gamut of humanity. You read hate, disgust, annoyance, joy, passion, sympathy and a lot of sarcasm. That’s the butter to my toast.

But nothing can beat the degree of ignorance.

I’m not sure what teenagers are learning in school these days. I’m too scared to ask and too old to bother. They also seem to be very expressive. Videos show them screaming and getting angered out of their young minds, even if you ask them for directions to the bathroom.

Everyone’s neurodivergent these days, and I don’t even know what that means.

Earlier this year, I purchased a book titled The Hype Machine: How social media disrupts our elections, economy and our health — and how we must adapt. The title sounds like a mouthful because the entire book is based on academic research led by author Sinan Aral. There’s an interesting section focused on a multitude of research done on Twitter (now X) that discusses how false news spreads significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth — sometimes by an order of magnitude.

It seems that truth does not travel as effectively as false news. While the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top 1 percent of false news cascades routinely diffused to as many as 100,000 people.

“It took the truth approximately six times as long to reach 1,500 people and twenty times as long to travel ten reshares from the origin tweet in a retweet cascade.” — Sinan Aral, ‘The Hype Machine: How social media disrupts our elections, economy and our health — and how we must adapt’

I guess it’s apt to say the truth here, hurts. Seems like social media audiences aren’t too keen with verification and authenticity when it comes to sharing what’s right. They prefer what’s wrong. Scoop the gossips, please.

There’s more.

False political news and urban legends spread the fastest and were the most viral. Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, even when controlling for the age of the account holder, activity level, and number of followers and followers of the original tweeter, and whether the original tweeter was a verified user.

I haven’t factored other social media platforms, but a glaring insight is made visible here: it’s not about the truth, it’s about the storytelling. Folks are sucked to their gadgets to witness the packaging, the force, frequency and reach of entertainment impact.

Yes, we go on social media to connect (like Medium) but for the greater majority, be it out of boredom, depression, profit, fame, or whatever reasons, they’re not on social media to learn about what makes the world right. We’re logged on to see planetary catastrophe, like watching Animal Planet to see the lion chow on the antelope, the boa constrictor wrapping itself around a buffalo to see it chocked to death. Okay, that’s me.

Having read that, it made sense why folks were doing the stupidest, unimaginable, annoying, and life threatening antics asking folks to “press like and hit that subscribe button”.

Here I was, unwell at the time, logged on because I needed entertainment to distract me from two things: my aches, and the carpet-bombing in Gaza.

This brings me to another insight: People turn away from the real news to escape the heaviness of the truths that are inflicting the world, to protect our mental health.

So it’s basically between the devil and the deep blue sea.

We’re screwed either way, unless we run away from it all. But what becomes of us when conversing with others? In our pursuit to avoid the noise about the world, we end up becoming the person described as living under a rock.

I’ve always been a team player. For me, if the ship is going down, I’m going down with it. Burning planet with zombies and all. Give me a weapon, I’m a fighter not a lover.

I just have to remind myself that folks doing stupid shit on TikTok, posting weird art on Instagram and hoping for attention on X are just ordinary humans trying to survive the madness and clinging to their own reserve fuel of sanity. Like seriously, if going out compromises your safety, where else can folks possibly go if not online? Beggars can’t be choosers now, can we?

We are all trying to survive, one day at a time, one foot before the other.

And with all that said and done, I’m back with a handful of stories written while carefully holding myself back from ranting about the failure of the UN Resolutions.

I only have one thing to say about the state of current affairs, and I’m saying this with composure and clenched fists:

Based on everything we’ve come to know and learn about human civilization, leadership is supposed to be about ending war, and preventing any situation that could lead to brutality, torture and death. With the outbreak of war of any kind, it isn’t the time to be choosing sides, arbitrating, discussing, weighing and debating about history.

With that I was inspired to write a fiction called The Date, my latest for Pitfall.

I welcome you to read it with layered understanding.

On the surface it reads like a straightforward story about a man and a woman with different outlook on things on a blind date. On closer inspection, it’s about miscommunication that leads to consequences.

The story is in no way intended to bash a gender or to demarcate stereotypical behavior associated with men and women. I’m not interested in that.

Instead, I wanted to address how we’ve lost the basic skill to converse, to accept dissimilarity, and to embrace the plurality of life around us. We have to be either right or wrong, to be politically correct, or act dismissive. We want to assert, not listen. We fear more than we celebrate. We take, take and take for as much as we can.

We take the simple joys in life for granted. We also forget to appreciate the generosity, kindness and patience the Universe throws at us.

At the current state of our world, it wouldn’t surprise me if aliens consider earth a pass, and fast-track to a greener dimension.

We’re barbaric and we’re bloodthirsty because our solution to geopolitics is repeated genocide. We shouldn’t be deciding on who gets to live and who gets a permitted license to kill.

I wish I’m watching a B-Grade war movie that I can press stop and skip. Unfortunately, I’m watching the news.

I’m going to hop over to my Instagram reels and watch a video of a man who tries to ride a killer whale and gets bitten. Poetic justice.

Happy Halloween y’all and goodbye October 2023.

Salud and Namaste, Natasha