In fear of sounding too much like Jesse from the Fast Show, who comes out of his shed only to comment on what he's eaten that day, I find the need to express my annoyance in an unsolicited fashion:
Today my pet-peeves are cell-phones and the internet.
My main issues with them are that they allow people to be lazy in their relationships with others and that they are abusive to our self esteem. Instead of talking, people text and instead of solidifying commitments everyone knows 5 minutes before their "commitment" they can cancel with a non-confrontational text. This goes the other way as well- instead of talking in advance a text is sent half an hour before people want to do something expecting you to have no prior plans. Even commercials on TV advertise the need for faster phones and internet services otherwise you'll be left behind, always in the dark- excluded from society. Even worse is when you are interacting with others and they spend half their time posting random facts and/or observations to Facebook or Twitter (that no one really cares about anyway) and then checks and rechecks people's comments getting a skewed high from their virtual friend's acceptance. This is what I call an addiction. Going around and shamelessly aiding people in their attempts at gaining approval- by virtually commenting on their daily calls for a self esteem boost- does not make a person a real friend.
Even religious worship isn't free of the iphones and ipads that people mistakenly thinks they're discretely browsing. And whats worse is that the iphone craze has created a following based on entitlement and comparison. If you don't have the latest gadget you wont be as cool as the guy who keeps on top of the trend wave- and the guy who does is going to let everyone else know he's that guy, because unlike the status-attention-seekers he gets his high from having what no one else does. There's nothing more ridiculous than seeing middle aged men with receding hair and expanding waist lines trying to one up each other by having the latest version of this or that gadget. It always starts with, "Why don'tcha hava look at this" as the man leans toward his competition with gadget in hand. The other will either engage by pulling out an identical symbol of power or will jab back with an aloofness which demonstrates his superiority to the guppies of advertising ploys. Then when that guy doesn't get his approval or superiority high he'll try finding it by showing off to the tech-baffeled elderly, the oblivious housewives or the monetarily depressed students. It's yet another branch of the self-esteem-retarded society that has developed as a result of people living in a contrived reality.
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