Who are you posting for?

Time is gold.

There’s always so much to do at work and so many people we have to deal with. There are times when we just want to have our “me time”, but people end up bothering us, and it’s in these moments that we just want to disappear from the entire world, or vice versa.

This is what Henry Bemis experienced in an episode of The Twilight Zone, “Time Enough At Last”. It follows the story of a man who just really wanted to read his book, but is surrounded by people who prevent him from doing so such as his boss or his wife. Out of frustration, he goes inside a bank vault to have some peace and quiet. When he then goes out to come back to the real world, there was no world to come back to anymore, as an “h-bomb” exploded, annihalating the entire face of the earth. For a moment, he is devastated, having lost his loved ones, and realizing that he is completely alone. He quickly ends his misery when he soon finds a public library filled with books, realizing that he has all the time in the world to read. Unfortunately, as he picks up a book, he stumbles, causing his glasses to fall off and shatter, leaving him virtually blind.

If I were to translate this to the present, this is how it would happen:

There’s this college girl who is constantly glued to her cellphone. When she’s walking, when she’s in class, when she’s at dinner with her friends and family, all she ever does is update her status on Facebook, Tweet every second of her life, and Instagram everything she sees.

Whenever she does this, certain people try to stop her from doing so. In class, her professor scolds her to stop using her cellphone and start listening. At dinner, her parents tell her to put down the phone and have a decent meal with them. At an outing, her friends ask her to join the conversation and the games they’re playing.

Out of frustration from all the people trying to ruin her “social media life”, she slowly starts to isolate herself from the people around her. She puts on earphones at dinner so that her parents can’t talk to her. She replaces her real friends with those she found online, and chooses to talk to them instead.

Her phone then suddenly crashes, forcing her to let it go and have it repaired. As she goes back to her “real” life, she realizes that whenever she goes home, her family doesn’t bother talking to her anymore. She finds out that her friends still constantly go out and see each other, but don’t bother inviting her anymore.

This saddens her for a time, as she has no one to talk to or share updates with. But as soon as she gets her phone back from the repair shop, she forgets all of it, and starts getting back to her “virtual” world.

Once again, she updates her status, tweets her feelings and takes pictures of everything. Slowly, she realizes that none of her old “close” followers are liking or commenting on them anymore, and of course not her family or friends. Now when you check her profile, despite all the constant posts, you’d see that it’s just all by her.


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