Faux Real
kbolilia@theguidon.com
When was the last time that you didn’t begin your sentences with an “I”?
One of this generation’s greatest achievements was our ability to self-promote, market, and single-handedly swivel the spotlight to us.
This is Generation Me.
We’re a creative crop, brimming with initiative and stricken by opinion in massive excess. And guess what? We had platforms for it too.
Every Facebook status, tweet and blog entry stood for something—the plights of your stomach, your backstabbing friend, or the coding violation you got from the MMDA—we’ve all got our stories, and if it fit in 140 characters or less, it was going to be told—and it was going to be heard, too.
But the real curse of Generation Me is also its most formidable gift: heightened self-awareness.
We are so in touch with our feelings, and the many ways you can wear a certain top, the awesome food you just had at some restaurant, or the mundane affairs of your day.
We know what we choose to know—Zanessa’s breakup, the next Forever 21 sale, and where you can have your fill of Bonchon and Wee Nam Kee. But what about say, the RH Bill? Do we care about that?
How about the controversies circulating the Church, after the Pope allegedly said it was acceptable to for male prostitutes to use condoms?
What about Hubert Webb and his recent acquittal, Lauro Vizconde’s persisting grief, our faulty justice system that took 15 years to make a decision, and the investigation that had so many loopholes it could pass off as a basketball net?
This is not an issue about whether or not Webb is guilty, or whether you’re pro-contraception or not.
I am not about to go preach about morality, or religion for that matter—and neither is this about making judgement calls about what you do or do not know—this isn’t a quiz bee.
What I care about is us, barely caring at all.
We are so self-aware to the extent of severe self-involvement, that in the context of the Internet and valued selectivity, we have deliberately shut out the predicaments of others.
No one is asking for you to tweet or blog about it, but it is more than enough that you are conscious of something beyond yourself.
Introspection can only do one good for so long, but eventually you’ve built a crypt, and all you take with you is well, you. Everything you.
But here’s a painful caveat: one of the first things that the real world (the one outside the Internet) would teach you, is that not everything is and can be about you.
What Generation Me needs isn’t more avenues for shameless plugging and oversharing—what Generation Me needs is some empathy.
