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If our heart is so easy to be broken, it is not our fault. We used to live in a small community, where we were only able to talk to people with whom we spent a lot of time. With a strong bond between us, we could say anything to each other because we were able to relate to each other. But not any more. The modern social media apps have enabled us to meet and talk to hundreds or thousands of people over night, whom we don’t know at all. We try to use the same honesty to talk to each other, but to our horror, it doesn’t work any more: whatever we say, we are hurting certain group of people, either racially or sexually or ideologically or religiously. You name it. There are so many ‘red lines’ we can’t afford to cross that talking is just like walking on the minefield: anytime you could be blown up. Soon we have learned to act, to fake. We have learned not to break people’s “glass heart” and we anxiously want to protect our own glass heart. We still need to express ourselves, but how? Young people go to karaoke to sing, old people go to dance ‘广场舞’ , some other people choose to talk about someone who lived 5000 miles away and died 500 years ago. It is a wise choice, which could bore people to death but will never break people’s heart. It’s safe too, but so empty that if you look into sky, you will find the space is more crowded than our talking. Check out your chatting history and what you see? A few restaurant dishes plus lots of praises. That’s all. We don’t offer anything substansive, we are frightened to give any honest responses: we just bullshit each other. Even worse: we have adopted it as a norm and anything meaningful sounds abnormal. Now pretending is our default, with lots of titles: culture, belief, religion, ideology, patriotism, national identity etc. We truly believe we are entitled to be fragile, sensitive and special. You want to talk to me? Have a self censorship first; anything different from my entitlement is disrespectful and heart breaking. Using such political correctness metrics, we have successfully made our conversation intellectually destructive and “bullshitingly (Do we have this word?) constructive. So the purpose of communication is meant to chase praises and avoid being pissed off only. C’mon my friends, don’t you ever know the praiser and the praised, the pissoff-er and the pissoff-ed (did I create another word?) will be buried under the same soil and eventually turn into the same dust? By the time we sit in a wheel-chair in the nursing home, all these today’s resentments will only put a smile on the corner of our saliva-dripping mouth: silly me, why should I have given a f-ck about all those crap! |
