Apr
12
2010
1

On Being Unique and Speshul

My brother pointed out several times over the past year and a bit that a good portion of facebook updates and photos are geared towards sheer self-indulgent “look at me!” moments. Put simply, everybody wants everyone to acknowledge how special and unique they are… by doing the exact same things as everybody else.

The prime example of this is the self-portrait “yay we went to the restaurant and were all scene-y” photos uploaded ad infinitum. The easiest tell of this amateur attention whore is the arm extended above in the photos, as if they’re beckoning some sort of bird of prey to swoop down and peck our their eyeballs. If you do this and upload a gazillion photos every Monday after your trips out, I’m judging you -.- Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing too horrid about being sociable. Just because I’m a recluse living in a high-tech cave occassionally scratching my belly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t got out. I just don’t want to see 1000 photos of you in the exact same pose, arm extended with pouty lips which became fashionable god-knows-when. The pouty lips is transgender, by the way, lest I be accused of chauvinism.

Then there are the trendy-but-obscure status updates; the kind of things which make the perpetrator, on the face of it, seem ‘edgy’ and hip and shit. “Harold Bobbit is turning awesome into fashion!” or “sadness is the new happiness”, and so on. They’re non-sensical, but so left-field as to be positively trendy. GOD YOU ARE SO FUCKING SPECIAL! Like a blossom, in a field of blooms.

Outside of this, I continually find it remarkable how people in their interactions with one another will continously try to explain to great detail some extraordinary characteristic of theirs, or how X trip or Y party was so off the chain because “I just like being crazy, tee hee hee”, in an attempt, subconscious or otherwise, to make the listener(s) think they are truly special and zany and crazy and worthy of exception. I find this remarkable because, for fuck’s sake, we are not special. I’ve written on this before on this site, but damnit it needs to be repeated. Nobody is a fucking snowflake. We’re all copying something or somethings no matter how unconventional you might think you are being.

Unless you’re the next Churchill, Freddy Mercury or Nelson Bloody Mandela, you are not going to make a huge impact on the world, and you are certainly not going to impress anyone by doing the same “special” things your friends do every other night (if Facebook is any indication). Come to think of it, those aforementioned “special” people were arguably so because of a sequence of circumstances in their favour more than some sort of divine grace. Churchill was a raving alcoholic who was a horrid peace-time statesmen, but just happened to have the right mojo, or rather the anti-Chamberlainness, to lead Britain during the war. If Queen had continued until irrelevance, much like Nirvana, would we really have idolised him so much? If Mandela hadn’t spent decades in jail and escaped imprisonment, would he be the icon he is today? I’m sceptical.

This leads me to the other kind of “I’m a speshul unique blossom”, is in one’s personal ‘experiences’. I seem have been getting into arguments left right and centre the past couple of months, and I’m not sure if that was always the case and I’m just more aware of it now, or whether I’m just being particularly curmudgeonly recently. Nonetheless, often I encounter people telling me of their own experiences much like a Pokemon trainer would unleash Pikachu and claim to have the ‘trump card’ simply because I don’t have the same experiences/pokemon. What utter bullshit. Nobody has truly unique experiences anymore. At least, nobody who doesn’t drop shitloads of acid, so playing up anectdotal experience as some sort of magical trump card that beats any kinda of intellectual, philosophical, legal or other understanding of an issue or event isn’t any more valid than the other. Put simply, very few people are truly smarter, nicer, kinder or less annoying than everybody else, so stop pretending like you are!

Finally, it’s always interesting to note gossip about people or a person who is ‘nasty’ or an ‘asshole’ or less wonderful than all the other unique and beautiful flowers in this world. I say ‘interesting’, because it’s fast becoming clear to me that, although we all generally think that we as individuals are never as annoying as Harold Bobbit, and we never can fathom how they aren’t aware of their annoying-ness, we never realise that maybe, juuuust maybe, we’re as annoying at the next meatbag down the line. Very few people are genuinely nice all of the time, and most of those turn out to be pedophiles anyway, so ragging on one particular person or persons for being a douche is really kinda ironic.

Of course, not that this would ever stop me from being nasty to someone else. That’s far too much self-medication. Likewise, this is all just based on me. And I’m one-of-a-kind. So There!

Song of the day: The Deftones – 976 Evil

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