The dawn of the
new measures of friendship, love and self-worth are here and they aren’t
pretty! But before we sneak a peek at them, let’s rewind and get back to the
basics. Let us ask ourselves, where would we be without these elements? They
are the foundations on which the person we become and are stand and together,
they lend themselves to our perception of ourselves and our self-worth. But
gone are the days when friendships were about battle scars and scraped knees; a
distant memory is all that can be called of the innocence of hand holding and
shy, awkward glances that led to love. Because, let’s face it, in the era of
smart phones, selfies and innumerable social apps, we have lost sight of what’s
true and real.
In this day and age, the new measure of
popularity is how many friends you have on Facebook and how many followers you
have on Twitter and Instagram. For those of you in the medieval darkness, let
me tell you that you’re only allowed a limit of 5,000 friends on Facebook. You
read that right. Five thousand! Post that, you have to change your profile into
a page to add more people on to your list and get more people to follow you.
Now when they say follow you, they mean follow your every move and this in turn
means you have document almost everything from your daily life to keep it
interesting for all your followers. From what you ate and where you went to
your new shoes and your sickly pet, you’ve got to keep those posts coming!
Twitter and Instagram on the other hand, have no limit. It’s a case of ‘the
more the merrier’. In addition to the regular celebrity artists, singers and
sports personalities that you find on twitter, you’ll also find tweets from the
Dalai Lama, the Pope, Queen Rania (the Queen of Jordan), Lord Voldemort and God
(the latter two being hilarious parody accounts).
When it comes to love, affection and
loyalty is measured by the number of pictures you have in common with and how
many likes, tags, comments, shares, retweets, favourites and hashtags you receive
from your significant other. The same goes for someone you’re interested in –
you can measure just how much they like you and just how much they are
interested in you if you’re at the top of their search list and what they’ve
tagged you in. If a guy doesn’t have you in his display picture (DP) or hasn’t
posted a picture of the two of you together in what seems like forever, then
he’s just not that into you. If a girl doesn’t like every picture you put up
the very second that it goes up and follows it up with a heart emoticon, then
she may just have you in the friend zone.
In the long run, can this and does this
really impact our self-worth? For the below 25 generation, I believe it does
because I’ve heard people scream “Why is that guy liking all your pictures?” or
burst into tears with “Who is that girl in your DP?” once too often for my
liking.
For me though, true friends are those who
don’t hold it against you when you’ve been out of touch for forever and are
able to pick up from where you left off; true love can be found in those who
stand by you in times of trouble and tribulation, in silence but with strength
to hold you up; and self-worth can be found in the love, laughter, memories and
adventures you’ve actually shared with those around you.
