Dear Agony Akka,
I am an 18-year-old girl. I have a lot of friends who pressurise me to open an account for myself in Instagram. I am not really interested in social media and all those things. I find it boring. I don’t even use my Facebook account regularly. Then, one day, they all just ganged up on me, humiliated me, and left me in tears. Is it wrong to survive without a social media account?
— Really Embittered and Low
Dear REAL,
It was astonishing to get your email. I did not realise that there are 18-year-olds existing in the world today who can survive without Instagram or social media. It was a bit like that scene from popular Hollywood film The Martian where the NASA guys are looking at Mars through satellite imagery and they find Matt Damon sitting there, alive and eating potatoes.
It is quite a shock, you know. My first thought was, oh my god we must send a rocket to her planet and rescue her.
Notice how I use the word ‘rescue’. The first thought one gets when one receives an e-mail from an 18-year-old without Insta account is that of extreme deprivation. What does she eat? Is she feeling cold? Can we use a drone to air-drop a smartphone to her so that she can send us pictures of her current condition? How about calling the Army to shimmy down the building and deliver essential supplies like broadband cable etc.
Then one calms down and breathes easy. Because you realise here is one 18-year-old who is sending lucid e-mail and is clearly alive with fully functioning brain. Now, my thought was, oh my god can I send rocket and join her in this offline nirvana.
Simultaneously, many other thoughts were running through my head. How did she escape? Does she use Kevlar or Kryptonite monkey cap on head to prevent the entry of the overwhelming, overpowering desire to take pictures of herself in every possible variation of activity and share it with the world?
As you must have noticed in cafes, streets, bus-stops. During face-washing, nail-polishing, beard-trimming. Coffee, baby, abs, other body parts. Everything is photographed and uploaded. I have no idea why Gen Z is recording itself in such detail for posterity. I cannot see any kind of posterity or extra-terrestrial life that might be remotely interested in how Gupta-ji eats parathas. Forget posterity, even presenterity is not interested. But does this faze them? Not one bit. They stream on relentlessly like lemmings headed over a cliff.
That is when I realised that scientists might be interested in this letter writer. They are doing important research work to find out what makes the homo sapien tick. What has this two-legged creature done in the Anthropocene era that has brought us so close to imitating what happened to the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous era.
But researchers are finding it very hard to get intact brains for study. Large portions of the human brains they are receiving in the labs these days have turned to mush. Like what happens to Parle G biscuit when you dip it for too long into hot tea. Useless for study purpose.
But you, dear REAL, might still have an intact brain. And that will one day come in handy for Science. Please be sure to leave a signed will assigning it for research. In the meanwhile, continue your blissful existence in that rarefied atmosphere where you still eat pizza without the world watching.
I can’t.
— AA
agony.akka@gmail.com
