Social media is really only good for three things: 1) Voyeuristic glimpses into your friends’ lives to see how much better you’re doing than them. 2) Egotistical bragging so that your friends know you’re doing better than them. 3) Finding really rad pictures of corgis.
Checking in on FourSquare is merely a way for someone to prove to you they’re not eating donuts naked on the couch by themselves. Baby pictures? Just proof that their genitals work. It’s all vanity. Unless it’s sharing corgi pictures.
Anyway, a doc at the Cleveland Clinic talked to Fox Business and expounded on that very common phenomenon while introducing us to a new trendy disease: financial cyberchondria. Basically, we want to be just as popular as our friends, so we go and spend money at places to prove that we’re popular. It’s not so much a disease per se as an unhealthy financial philosophy, but boring two-paragraph reminders that you should be smart with your cash don’t get you interviewed by Fox Business. New diseases do. Especially if they involve social media.
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2012.
I’m shocked that people aren’t just throwing antibiotics at this, seems like that happens for everything else that ails our society.
We can file this “disease” in the “Excuses for being an idiot” folder.
I want those 5 minutes back….NOW!
I’m old, poor, in the way, unhip, uncool, unsexy, and out of the loop. I already know all those things. So I sure as hell don’t need some electronic gizmo to tell me…
Nor do I care who goes to what bistro or bar or concert…and runs up their credit card balance even higher. I am nearly debt-free, go where I want, do what I want, and stay home when I want. I haven’t turned Real Life into some kind of Coolness Contest. Besides, I’m too old, so I’d never win.
For twenty years, I have been relieved that Cleveland was not a hotbed of this kind of expensive pretentious crap. If we ever get so hip, slick, cool, and trendy that we are just a smaller New York, Chicago, Miami, or Los Angeles…hopefully, I’m gone…literally or figuratively (as in dead) by that point in time. But I’m too poor to move, so I’ll probably just stay in my house a lot.
You can’t have the word “Twitter” without the word “Twit”…
Chuckles the Clown