Given an E-mail ID or a customer care number, what do you prefer?
In a room full of strangers would you dare to initiate a conversation or would you simply take out your mobile phone, even if to swipe away each notification just to have something to do?

Technology today has given us so many “friends” and “connections” that we have altogether misconstrued the concept of socialising. We want instant gratification. We want to feel loved and popular, and more than that we want others to feel we are loved are popular.

“Hi, how are you?”
“Fine, thank you. What about you?”

Has been replaced by

“Hey, sup?”
“Nm, wbu?”

For the non-millennials here, this translates to “Hey what’s up” and “Nothing much, what about you.”
Sidenote: I added the punctuation as a courtesy. In reality, punctuation has become uncool and rather pointless.

It’s just absolutely devastating that the standard response to “sup” has become “nm”. By the way, the person doing “nm” is probably listening to music, texting and maybe even gaming on his console or PC almost simultaneously. Does this really sound like “nm” to you?

Depends on what your perception of “much” is. Sadly, that perception has been driven by what you see on your social feeds now. Every single time you refresh your feed, you see another person pouting away gleefully, sharing pictures of a night-out, checking into a fancy restaurant, and the ubiquitous cat photos, of course.

The average person has about 155 friends and spends approximately 20 minutes per day on Facebook. Assuming the average time spent on one post is 6-10 seconds, accounting for response time, a person can see around 120-200 posts in 20 minutes.

Let’s assume that the 155 friends in picture are actually having a good time. Depending on their level of activeness on social media they might be posting about 2 such updates per week to even 2 such updates per day. Let’s assume an average of 8 per person per week, which makes it 155*8  = 1240 updates per week or about 175 updates per day on your feed just from your friends. Now imagine you are just a simple person, go to the office on weekdays, buy groceries, browse facebook and do laundry on weekends, watch a bit of Netflix in your free time but are not too much of a social butterfly. Would these 175 odd posts about your friends having the time of their lives EVERY SINGLE DAY not dig into your happiness? Even if you were contented with your life before, seeing one friend starting class at London School of Business, another satiating their wanderlust, and yet another starting work at Google is bound to gnaw at your self-esteem.

Now look at what you are doing, and it will seem like “nm” to you.

PS. Whether what those 155 others are doing is actually as glamorous as it looks, is a whole other topic altogether.

Thoughts? Comments? Criticism? Fire away!

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