Hey Covid-19, what’s the go?
There’s billions of bored people out there, trending #covidandtheselfie as a lock-down stress-relief. Covid and the Selfie are a dangerous mix. Bad Covid – you’ve caused a fair bit of social grief. And way too many selfies.
Home is where you are locked in
Because of you, we have billions of people trapped in their homes. That’s OK if your home is a mega-yacht, but for the Great Unwashed ‘home’ is a pretty average place to have to spend a lot of time. For most of us, ‘home’ is somewhere to eat and sleep in while planning more important activities. It’s not a great place to spend a lot of time in.
Staying at home means more time to pause and reflect on who we are. That leads to questions that shouldn’t be asked outside of a philosophy lecture theater. Who am I? Why am I here? What have I done with my life?
These are dangerous questions for the (usually) milling masses of humanity. One of the key reasons we humans make up a milling mass, is because milling is better than sitting still. Sitting still leads to self-reflection. And self-reflection leads to problems. We aren’t built for an extended bout of self-reflection. Our emotional make-up is a bit too fragile to be exposed to a lengthy inward gaze.
Exhibit A – Narcissus.
Yes, good ol’ Narcissus, who gave us the term for loving oneself. He pioneered the selfie back in the days when a pond reflection was considered fairly high-tech.
Narcissus was kept safe from his own beauty by Liriope (his loving mother) who made a career out of hiding mirrors so Narcissus would never see his own reflection. She knew that poor ol’ Narc was likely to fall in love with himself if he ever saw just how beautiful he really was. She knew this because a Seer named Tiresias told her so. And Seers have a way of knowing this sort of stuff.
Liriope – A.K.A. “mum”
But for all her efforts with mirrors, it seems Liriope ignored the danger posed by reflective ponds. Even if she did, Liriope couldn’t cover every pond in Boeotia. Or Greece. Or anywhere else for that matter. Of course, there’s a chance she could have sorted that out by luring an asteroid to impact Greece, covering the world in darkness and dimming those nuisance pond reflections – but that’d be a big call for a water nymph. Mind you, if Nonnus was right then Liriope was actually none other than Selene, the Moon Goddess and maybe she could have covered the world in a new darkness? You’d imagine a Moon Goddess could jiggle loose a piece of moon-rock and casually throw it into earth’s atmosphere as a leviathan asteroid? That would have sorted out the pond reflection issue.
But we digress.
The point of all this is that we humans shouldn’t reflect on ourselves for very long or very deeply or very much. It’s just plain dangerous.
Selfie’s as a form of introspection (a random heading for SeO credit)
In a standard, busy, non-Covid world, we’d all take Selfie’s and share them around the virtual world. They wouldn’t mean much – we’d take them day after day, and never really get a chance to pay too much attention. Sure, there’d be a bit of feedback from our network of friends and connections, but nothing was ever really meant to last for more than a day. There was always some new activity or bandwagon to jump on the next day. Then along came Covid, and everything just stopped.
Suddenly that happy-go-lucky selfie became more important. Suddenly, there are no exciting backgrounds or exotic locations to distract from our rather average selves. There are only so many locations one can shoot an enviable Selfie in the average home. Rather than focus on the action or the moment or the location, we’re suddenly confronted by the banality of our own selves.
And so the Selfie became the tool for the inward gaze. For reflection and questions about life and what matters.
Covid and selfies, ‘n’ stuff…
The level of danger to posed by Covid and the Selfie to human civilisation is so big that we Onlineandbored folk have left our couches and donned pajamas so we can get this message out to you. Yes, YOU. We know you’ve been lured by the siren call of the Selfie. So our task is to expose the horrors of Covid and the Selfie in the hope that you will take action and bring about change for the good of our planet and the people who so lovingly mill across its surface.
Slow-moving enthusiasm
Mind you, we haven’t exactly burst a boiler with enthusiasm. And that’s not a personal analysis biased through subjective introspection. No-no, my Friend! (Gosh that exclamation mark was tiring. Almost expired putting so much weight on the capital key while hitting that damned “1” key. So much effort for so little output). No, we can absolutely assure you that very little energy has been devoted to this post because your erstwhile authors have just noticed that this post has been a draft for quite some time. Started in January 2021. And here we are in August, 2022 and…. TA–DA!!@!!! (more effort – we hope you are paying attention, ’cause this is taking an inordinate amount of our disinterest to complete).
You’re welcome. We’d work out how long January 2021 to August 2022 is and make a big deal about it – but that’s maths and nobody on this enormous, green-but-slightly-mirky-smog-grey planet would ever consider maths appropriate if you are bored and happen to be online.
Oh. One more thing..
Nup. Too hard. Will have to wait until later. Quite a bit later, if our track record remains intact.