2013-04-17

people in line

A 21st century alternative to spying on your neighbours is twitter: you can observe people without ever contacting them and, as a special treat, you can even choose your "neighbours" depending on interest. You just read their day to day tweets and watch them pouring their lifes into the internet in accurate 140-character-steps, never knowing that some creepy girl is actually reading what they write and learning something about humanity on their example. A few case studies:

  1. A very intelligent boy who seems to be kind of lost in his own opinions, or rather struggling between doing what he wants, doing what others want him to do and doing what he'd like to want to do. I was intrigued because he loves classic music, but looks good (unusual combination) and tweets exactly what I think very often. We talked quite a couple of times. What I couldn't work out is his true opinion about himself and why he is actually so unsatisfied with his life. Also, I am not sure about his radicalism concerning a few social and political issues- I sometimes have the impression that he's only joining one or another side to belong somewhere. I would have liked to find out more but after being very interested in me he suddenly stopped talking to me about half a year ago. I didn't find out why, either, but we still follow each other. Peculiar? Yes, very, but also very captivating. 
  2. A girl who made a very shallow first impression, I can't even remember why I decided following her (probably because she had the most perfect eyelashes I've ever seen). She posted tons of duck face selfies, but seemed very honestly very fond of her family which I liked because it's a rare thing these days. One day I decided to take a look at her tumblr- I was bored- and I was stunned about some of the things she reposted on there: quite intelligent art, some texts she didn't write but apparently liked. It made me realise that, apparently, people who put on tons and tons of make-up and wear snapbacks could, in fact, be undercover-philosophic. She seemed unhappy the last weeks before she deleted her twitter account.
  3. Another boy who is plain cute in his attempts to be a deeper character. To do him justice, he's kind of progressing, when we started following each other he was just one of those kids who feel like they wanna be part of the alternative, cool scene- now, as far as I can judge, he is trying to discover what his talents and personality actually are, which is great- the more people engage in this process, the more splendid the world will be.
  4. A girl who is just wonderful in how honestly she is interested in stuff she is interested in, and how she just kind of does her thing, not caring about pretending to be someone, or presenting herself to the world. We sometimes talk a little and we get along nicely, wish I knew more people like her in real life.
  5. A boy who is just as much of a mystery as the first one, sometimes even more. I really can't work him out. He's very handsome and his style suggests an interest in fashion, and also him being a bit of a chav, but his tweets are often the complete opposite and written by a sharp mind (apart from tweets about girls which aren't that intelligent/original, but then again, I sometimes doubt he's being serious). He's, on the one hand, a happy-go-lucky kind of person, who just lives a carpe diem kind of life- on the other hand, there must have been a lot of shit going on in his life when he was younger and he's obviously still preoccupied by that. He loves and does things so contradictory to each other that I just don't understand how he even lives his life. There's two sides to him which, to my mind, barely go together, and I would love to find out which one is the real.
What do these observations tell us? Well, first of all- humans are incredibly complex. There's 7 billion highly complicated beings wandering around on this planet and this is an absolutely overwhelming thought to me. Second- you can never be 100% sure about the judgements you make about people. Third- somebody might be watching you and won't know. Somebody might actually be analysing the shit I tweet and, even worse, the shit I blog, and trying to imagine what kind of a person I am. Creepy? Yes, very. But what goes around, comes around, I guess.

The last thing they show is how much of a life I don't have. Spent the last days mulling over my existence and the universe, and crying over the song "It never rains in southern california", but that's a different story. I might tell you, someday.

2 comments:

  1. I think this is very interessting. Definitely no shit!

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  2. ich könnte mir sowas stundenlang durchlesen. ich denke, das interesse an anderen menschen ist in jedem von uns vorhanden und hat nichts damit zu tun ob man ein "leben" oder zumindest nichts besseres zu tun hat. aber vielleicht stimmt mit meinem leben ja auch irgendwas nicht :D
    wie auch immer. jedenfalls lese ich solche ergüsse sehr gern (;

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