First of all, a premise: I am not about to criticise the precautionary measures being taken to fight the spread of the infection. I encourage everyone to do everything is required of them to prevent more people suffering and dying. That said, here goes my rant.

Because we live in a world where everything has a trendy name, we now have terms like “Social Distancing” become an official status. This obsession with giving a label to pretty much everything is getting out of hand.

Flashback to little less than 20 years ago. I was a teenager, I had a LiveJournal and I went on a long rant about women who didn’t identify as feminists. I couldn’t understand, and honestly still cannot, why wanting equal opportunities at work and in social life, demanding a fair pair and refusing to tolerate blatantly sexist behaviour would be something a woman wouldn’t identify with. Of course I now see how the term and label gets exploited (You don’t like this all-female remake of a film? You’re sexist!) and perverted, very often for commercial interest or exceedingly biased agendas.

I still identify as a feminist, because morally and conceptually that’s what I am. And I honestly don’t give a fuck about the online backlash a statement such as that might provoke.

That said, I have grown weary of labels. Especially the way they are used today. When communication tools like Twitter began, I was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon. I loved the immediacy of it, how I could select a source of information and have the updates delivered straight into my pocket (where I keep my phone, yes). And I even found the hashtag system clever and fun. Until it wasn’t.

It started to become a substitute for content. People started applying “meaningful” labels on meaningless content, and it turned into a patting each other on the back for doing nothing and being proud of it. The pointless and senseless became fashionable, and suddenly sticking a label on things became the only thing that mattered, even more than having something to stick that label upon.

The dangers with this type of behaviour is when, aside from the sheer emptiness and vacuity of those who are now our entertainers and celebrities escalates, other things are given equal attention and get popularised. Ignorance (hello, flat-earthers?), hatred (and a good day to you, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and so on and so forth), stupidity (of course I wouldn’t leave out the new politics) and self-indulgence (each and every person making a living about expressing an opinion on something without even doing as much as basic research).

This is now a world where instead of using Twitter to access the news, we use Twitter to make the news. Where instead of having little girls play with make up we have little girls publishing videos in which they teach how to apply make up, which they happen to have learned 2 hours earlier by watching an already existing video explaining the exact same thing. Where reviewing something has become getting money for advertising something, regardless if you like it or not. (To be fair, this was the case most of the times even in the past, but at least those doing it had a minimum mastery of language and syntax to make the whole experience somewhat worth our time.) A world where we want to be congratulated for doing the minimum required during a pandemic: staying the fuck at home and avoiding spreading a virus. And a world where we are allowed to foster our narcissism because all it takes is access to the internet and using trending tags.

Meanwhile, all our “heroes” are dying. Thinkers, writers, movers and shakers, all the people we could look at and go: “Fucking hell, now that is an amazing human being!” are disappearing, due to illness, age, the harshness of the world we live in, etc. And with their absence, it feels like the world grows darker and darker, while the masses popularise what they feel familiar with rather than what they could learn from.

And I sit in my home, waiting for my regular life to restart, and having too much time to think about how I’d rather it didn’t. I’d rather this became a moment for the world to stop and think: where the fuck are we going with this? What’s the plan? Here is my crazy idea: how about we make a world where we need to earn respect, popularity and celebrity? I am so ready to like someone new. I just need a reason to. I just need someone to do more than just the bare minimum and demand recognition for it. Don’t you?

P.S. Has anyone re-watched Network, lately? It turned out to be rather prophetic…