The Social Animal. Not!!

Ahhh, Man the social animal. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we were not social like we are, but were un-social, individual reptiles like snake. We’d been either wiped out off the face of the planet or would have remained totally unevolved, to the point that I would not have been sitting here writing about my fellow men.

While this social connection has led us to where we are today, and we absolutely love being social, in company of other beings, it has also hardwired our brain to feel uncomfortable, uneasy and sometimes jealous of a person who doesn’t behave in the way social rules work. Add the fact that internet has made the world so small from what it used to be, we are constantly in touch with such individuals. And what do we do? We hate them for being too individualistic.

We love drama, we love to see other people suffer, we love pointing out other person’s mistakes and we don’t like, most of the time, when the other person succeeds. We totally ignore the fact that almost every one of us has the ability to do what the other person has done but probably we are too smart for that, we are too smart to indulge in practicing the tools of our trade, most of us are too smart to try something new, too smart to break our social barrier and move out of our comfort zone, too damn ignorant to tell other person, who is doing one thing better than us, that he isn’t doing some other thing right; we are too busy asking fishes to climb trees.

And yet, time after time we come across people who make some change in the world, through their sheer persistence and hard work, we come across people who leave the comforts of the world to take up the challenges which the world throw at their faces and instead of taking inspiration from these people we like to blame them for not doing enough in some other field. We fail to recognize that they are making the world a little bit better but focus on the fact that what they are doing is too little to change the world in any comparable manner.

Our cousins apes don’t have such complex system for living, they have a group of around 150 and they are intelligent enough to break it into subgroups if the number becomes too large. They somehow know, instinctively, that too many cooks will spoil the broth, which is something we people fail to learn from our primitive brethren. We like to be connected to almost no one socially and thousands of people virtually, and then act as if the social environment is the place to be, like we are designed to not breath air but the bits and bytes of social network, and when people are not connected socially in any way, they become more stupid and generally ignorant of people around them.

Human face is a treasure trove of emotions, the cheeks, the forehead, the eyes show the emotions as they really are. Tell someone you love her and she’ll look into your eyes the moments she can move past the overwhelming emotion your words elicit, meet someone you love and you can see the twinkle in her eyes, the unfakable smile tells you how genuinely interested a person is in you, all of this is absent from the virtual media which has suddenly become the preferred way people connect. And since the other person isn’t looking at your face, shouting, bitching, and being vitriolic becomes a lot easier. You can’t or won’t tell a person on her face that she’s ugly, but commenting that over her latest photo is easy because you won’t be there to see the look on her face.

I have come across people who have realized that the social media is something less-than-complimentary to one’s real life, and these people are always very interesting and entertaining. And then there are others who just live to update their pages with the latest and the greatest things that are happening to them, manufacturing their profiles one picture at a time. (There are some people hanging in the middle, tilting themselves in either group, but they are out of the scope of this article).

While this article has been good enough to show my disliking towards the social media, I still would like to give a TL;DR treatment which is that we are social animals, we absolutely love other people and looking at their frozen faces through a computer screen tend to fuck us up. Given a choice (and one always has this choice), one should prefer social life over social media. Will someone play with me?!