Untold Future

Time is a strange thing when you stop and think about it.  The fact that you are forever conscious of the present, and that we can fixate on our past and relive our memories, this makes our future become a mystery.  The present isn't always known to us, and sometimes events in our lives come and go before we realise the true extent of their significance.  The future however is something we can never experience until time permits us to do so.  Like a parent who let's a child only have ice cream once they finish their dinner, so too does time only permit us to experience all that life offers only after it lets life throw everything it can at us.

In a past post I wrote about the number 11 and it's significance in regards to our personal connections i.e. that our mobile numbers are 11 digits long in the UK and those 11 digits are all that separate you and the people you haven't met yet from engaging now.  I've been reflecting on this and thinking about all the people in my life who have come and gone.  A friend of mine recently died, the details of which I won't go into.  In losing him however I have been thinking about the impact people have on our lives.  While I know many don't believe in fate or destiny, if I stop to entertain the thought just for a while, with him I can be sure why fate brought me into his life.  I know the impact I had on him and I know he was grateful.  He was one of the few people who I actually believed and felt like they made an effort to keep me in their life and I felt like I had a place there, and I've said before I don't stay where I don't feel wanted.  I want you in my life but that has to be reciprocated, if it's not then I'm not going to make you stay.

When I think of some of the people that came into my life and the profound changes they made, mostly for the better although some were for the worse and one was amongst the worst you can possibly be, despite all this I find myself wondering what my future holds.  Who'll be the next person to leave such a profound impact?  Have I already met them or do I know of them?  Will the impact they leave be one of happiness or sadness?  It's an odd feeling to think that my life as it is today, could be completely different in the future all because of one person who I haven't even met yet.

As I look to the future I find myself focusing more on my own life rather than the rest of the world because the latter has become increasingly depressing.  I'm going through my usual funk right now in respect of social media.  It is proving taxing, not because of the people I talk to but because of the people I don't.  I've spoken before about the 90-9-1 rule of Internet Culture and how it can be applied to social media, when you have 15,000 followers you can expect around 150 to actually engage with you.  To that end I have pursued a social media strategy to beat that rule, following only people I engage with and while that has proved effective in creating a social circle online that does engage, it  does make you focus more on the nature of your engagement.  When it comes right down to it, the way we form connections on social media are often through end points we don't realise at the time are such until someone actually connects with them.  You send out tweets you don't actually expect a reply to and suddenly people engage, on the flip side when you send out tweets you do expect engagement on and nobody does, that can be disheartening.  It does harken back to that song I have quoted so many times, Dark Blue by Jack's Mannequin and the lyric "If you've ever been alone in a crowded room, you'll know" - that's how social media can feel at times, and I know I am not alone.  Several celebrities online have struggled with the same problems and the negative sides of Twitter et al can be overbearing.  Stephen Fry and Seth Rogen to name a few have had quite public battles with this side of the Internet.

When you let go of all pretence and open up your vulnerable side and be honest about it all, maybe the truth is just something we don't like to admit, that we're lonely.  No matter how many people we have in our real lives, when we pursue our online personas through these profiles ultimately we do it because of the promise in the name "social" networking promises to expand our social lives.  Now I know there's considerable debate about whether it actually does and I think that is something best left to another post, instead I'd focus on the connotations for now.  If we engage in social networking then ultimately whether we want to admit it or not our goal is to be as social as possible through it, with our own insecurities and shyness being the barrier to this.  In the end we don't connect on the level we want with people out of fear.  The fear is real and the paranoia is too, I've seen it myself first hand online.  People afraid to reply to others even when they are interested in what they said, because they're either afraid of the response, or afraid of how they will look, or just afraid of being ignored.  The paranoia goes further and the doubts creep in, were they sincere in what they said, are they a real person, do they actually care, do they just want more followers.

I realise that all of this can translate into the real world too, our offline lives and social connections are subject to the same mentalities, however the offline world is rather unique in these problems in that the responses we must give are often time-limited.  When someone replies to a tweet you can consider your response and taking a while to reply isn't unheard of, but when someone is standing right in front of you then you have to be quite quick, you're often denied the chance to second guess what you say.  That denial of time to think, is also a denial of time to overthink which ultimately I think is the death of social media.  Overthinking leads you to consider your responses for too long and make them seem more weighted than they actually are, on the obverse of that it can also lead you to scrutinise replies made to you to a level much greater than they were ever intended.  How many tweets have you written only to delete them without posting them?  I know I have written quite a few and I know even here on my blogs there have been numerous blog posts over the years that I have drafted and deleted for many different reasons but none more so than overthinking.