12 April

Scrolling past all of the happy social lives on FB made me think of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Compare the two images. The variety of passion and emotion in Da Vinci’s picture, and the monotonous single ‘living our best lives’ vibe that oozes out of social media photos. You could say the social media photos are posed and don’t reflect the diversity of emotions that were happening at the time. That’s true. Though you don’t have to sit in too many bars or clubs for long to see that the ‘everybody is happy’ vibe is dominant, even when not posing. Another example of what some social researchers describe as the gradual replacement of our lifespan with a permanent adolescence, across all age groups. No conflict, no disagreement, just having good times, without making anybody feel challenged or uncomfortable. Each to their own, as the idiot saying goes. It’s like being stuck in a happy zombie movie. Bring the true passion back to our lives, the joy at tackling the hard stuff, of disagreement, of fighting through the challenges to achieve something bigger than ourselves. Idiot happy culture calls that ‘negativity’, because it never grew up. The damage we’re doing to our society by sharing nothing but curated happiness. It destroys peoples’ mental health faster than anything else, when they think all the difficulty they actually experience in their lives is somehow abnormal. Toxic positivity.