Blog: Delete! — July 2, 2023

 

I saw this post on Facebook, and the answers I read shocked me.

I opened Facebook. It was still in my writer profile/page mode, and a related group had a post that hundreds of people had responded to over the last 22 hours. What you see above is a screenshot of the post.

"Hatred" popped into my mind. So I commented.

A recent comment shocked me: "Me, myself, and I"

Wait. Delete? Delete yourself?

Yes.

That person was not alone. In fact, there were replies to it. The next was a meme of Mary Poppins with her umbrella, ready to rise and be off, with the words: "So done." It was followed by, "Me too." I wanted to pop a care emoji at the very least and possibly express some hopeful or encouraging sentiment. I noticed the group name--something to do with introverts. So maybe this was funny?

No.

I started scrolling. The "me" answer came up in an overwhelming ratio to all other answers. Now there were some like me who voiced a response like "hate" or "greed" or "betrayal." But the next most popular answer that I could see was still very similar to "Me, myself, and I" which was "humans."

But the common theme overall is that every answer identified a source of pain. And almost every answer, if it was not already humanity itself (either self or others), it was directly connected to humans our our perspectives. Wow. We are our own source of pain!

There was one comment out of the current 458 that said, "These comments are sad. Without pain or weakness, we would not have strength or pleasure." It went on. There were no replies.

One person had an answer with no human leverage: "spiders." (I couldn't like that one simply because it would disrupt the ecosystem because spiders eat other things I don't want around. But the one response that got my laugh said, "This post 😅😂😂"