Becoming Social Anti-social Beings in 2020

Social anti-social beings. This is the term that came to mind as I walked though the empty streets of Melbourne. I had almost forgotten it was a Friday night. As the downtown street are usually filled with people, young and old, almost always dressed to impress. I feel like I should note that Melbourne has some of the most unique street style I’ve stumbled upon. I wanna say it’s Toronto meets San Fran, meets Western Europe… one of the many things I love about it.

Anyways, back to what I was saying. I looked around as my mind crowded with unwavering thoughts, the most prevailing one was “holy fuck, are we just not the definition of social anti-social beings!?" Let me elaborate on that for a minute, cause at first I was like "wtf", what does this even mean? This may not even make sense after I attempt to explain it. Also, I’m on my second glass of red for the evening, so really not promising much over here. But if you think about it, everyday we complain about having to deal with people. In anyway, shape or form. Hate dealing with the barista cause she gave you skim milk when you clearly asked for soy, hate your coworkers, because well who doesn’t sometimes. Oh and who can forget about how annoying it is be when your friends try to make plans with you!? Speaking of friends… really missing them right about now. While I’ve been lucky enough to meet some wonderful people, despite the lockdowns and the chaos, I’ve also come to appreciate and cherish my mates back home. Not that it took moving across the world to realize I have some dope friends, but now, it’s a different kind of love. It’s that feeling you get when you think of them and it reminds you of home. The excitement you feel when you think that one day they’ll get a chance to visit and you can make some new memories in your new home.

Anyways, let’s not get too sappy over here. To state obvious, yes... I am in fact a huge extravert. Over the past year, my need for human interaction has only become more apparent. But back to my main point... We as a society, love, and I do mean love to complain about the difficulties of being social beings, constantly huffing and puffing every time we have to step outside of our homes. I mean not me…. I love being out and about, but most people… Question is, do we really hate it all that much? Bare with me… One of the first things that comes to mind is the millions and billions of memes, and TikToks, and YouTube blogs and even more Instagram posts. For a society that seems so perplexed by the idea of interacting with one another we sure do a lot of it. It’s not just that. As humans, we have this innate desire to be heard, to be seen and to be remembered. Whether it's in our immediate friend groups, our families, the work place and of course, social media, we like to be seen.

We post content, daily, hourly even, some of us are deadass glued to our screens for half the day (you know who you are). That content isn’t even explicitly ours, we share it with our friends, our followers our frenemies, let’s say. And, we post this content, some may argue, actually I think many would… That we post this content because we crave attention and we have this lingering need to be seen. I mean yeah… can’t really argue with that. We do crave attention, we want to be recognized for our achievements and praised for our well doing. We also have this detrimental desire to project perfection. We often play into ideologies around it, at times we do it unknowingly, but far too often we go out of our way to achieve it. We want others to see we are happy. We’ll break our freaking backs for the perfect selfie or spend 80% of our time crafting the perfect Instagram story. At the end of the day, did you even enjoy it? Just a thought, because I’ve started to ask my self this more often, but how much fun are we really having if we’re obsessively fixated on sharing our lives online. Don’t get me wrong, I love to post just as much as the next person, but I think I prefer to live the moment more.

On the other hand, a big part of why we post, I think, it's because we like to entertain people. Then, it’s the desire to connect with and reach others in ways that makes them feel things. Also to get a reaction out of them… any reaction really; laughter, envy, surprise, happiness, you get the idea. But why is this important? In a time when we are all loosing our shit about being stuck in quarantine in our homes, socially distancing ourselves from one another… wait isn’t this what ya’ll wanted anyways? Wanted to fuck off from work, have a valid excuse to ditch your friends, be able to tell the next mans standing too close to you, to give you 6ft of space without sounding like an ass hat? Yea or so you thought.

Truth is we need people. We want others, and we need to feel socially included and connected. When we don't, a part of us is really hurting. You may not awknowledge it, or admit it, but something does feel like it’s missing. Then it’s the little things like being able to grab a beer with your mates/friends (whatever the heck you want to call them) at a local pub, eat cheap food and laugh at dumb shit, it’s those tiny, taken for granted moments that we end up missing most. We may also end up realizing that having your friends and family attempt to drag you out of your comfort zone, and to social events is not because they secretly hate you and want to see you burn… but really, it’s because they love you and things are better when you’re all together.