Another One Bites The Dust

So long, auf Wiedersehen, and goodnight to Snapchat, by some definitions the vestigial social media app on my iPhone. Long gone are the days when you would ferry me personalised pictures of women’s bodies and therefor, much of your lustre has waned. My primary usage of you in the past couple of months has been twofold. Firstly, you’re the last app with infinite scroll I had left, and whenever I needed that glorious dopamine hit that comes from wasting my valuable time with flashing lights and pretty colours, I will happily trawl through the sensationalist pop culture garbage that is your discover section. The second is that a particular girl who rejected me still keeps unilaterally sending me snaps of her complaining about her work laptop being slow or running Windows updates or whatever. Is there some social convention that I don’t understand? I have no qualms with you not wanting to date me, in fact I think it’s laudable, it displays good decision making skills. But don’t keep contacting me with your inane whining - isn’t that just socialisation 101? Am I missing something?

I am reminded of my boy Torvalds' recent and now much-quoted interview where he bluntly described modern social media as a disease. I am reluctant to even bring it up really, because I read the original interview first and he makes multiple salient, relevant points, and the next day every tech media outlet picked up on exactly that turn of phrase. He went on to elaborate that they “encourage bad behaviour” and I think he is absolutely right, they have encouraged my own personal bad behaviour, and even built whole new bad habits into my psyche.

As discussed previously however, ripping it out of my phone is not all I had hoped it would be. Hopefully saying goodbye to Snapchat won’t create any additional FOMO, and will further my drive to have more meaningful interactions with the people that matter to me, but in anxious, troubled moments, perhaps flicking through it’s neverending stream of trash was actually rather comforting.