We could all stand to be a little more ignorant

Holy shit, Chicago, it’s nearly 2018. I know people always say time flies when you’re having fun and let me tell you 2017 has been an absolute metric fuck ton of fun. This past year has gone by like one of those tiny pen drawn flip books and there’s me in the corner doing cartwheels all over the place and then on the last 5 pages exploding into a fireball of joy. If I was given the task of creating a zodiac sign for this year it would be a person sitting in a ¼ filled bathtub-cold, sad and just waiting to please just please be enveloped in something warm and buoyant (like 2018 perhaps? please?)

There have been many lessons learned over the course of 2017 and there isn’t enough time in a day to list them all but if I had to pick a favorite, umbrella lesson it would be that ignorance is bliss. Such a sweet and simple turn of phrase that can be applied to many different situations. And this isn’t to say that the solution is being stupid or that being unaware and uneducated is the way to go through life but rather that sometimes we’re all better off just not knowing as in don’t dig for answers about something you know you truly don’t want to know. Don’t, as my mother once put it, ‘grind your face down into the dirt’ just to get the result you ALREADY KNEW was coming.

Perhaps there is a more important, meaningful story buried in all of this but I don’t have political opinions because I have nothing important to contribute to that ‘trending now’ topic and I have no opinions on society because everyone is garbage and always has been so let’s keep this as superficial as possible. Who doesn’t want a little fluff in this current climate? With this digression I mean to say that this life lesson made me think about social media (as most things do because social media has quietly been ruining lives since 2004) and how it allows us to judge people before actually getting to know them and reach our bony, dry fingers into the dusty crevices of people’s personal lives to scrape out information that we DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

Picture this-you meet someone and over the course of a few weeks you flirt, you exchange anecdotes, you share knowing smiles and then to make it real you MUST become friends on facebook, probably on instagram. Suddenly, you have access to all of the information you might have found out about them over the course of a few dates (date? what is date?) or maybe even YEARS! Suddenly, without any human interaction you can make a judgment call about someone without actually having to get to know him or her. You can decide to hate them and things that they stand for without any more explanation than perhaps a multicolored, emoji filled status or a repost of an article they didn’t write. You can look at pictures of them from years ago without having to go to their parents’ house to sit shoulder to shoulder while pulling out photo albums that still have the clear, sticky paper to hold them in place. You can gauge their political leanings or social opinions without engaging in a discussion or a lively debate. You can decide you don’t like their musical taste without sharing favorite songs while you sit in the car after a particularly nice evening. You can take everything you can consume about them as fact without having any contextual information and decide that you don’t like them and don’t want to date them or hell, even be FRIENDS with them.

Or picture this! You end a relationship with someone and although it needed to happen it wasn’t pretty. And yet, you leave the window of social media open, curtains violently flapping in the icy cold breeze. As Paul Simon said, losing love is like a window in your heart, everyone can see you’re blown apart, everyone can feel the wind blow-so why would you let someone ACTUALLY SEE with pictorial and textual evidence, especially some human garbage can that you had the misfortune of spending an inordinate amount of time with? Or on the flip side, why let yourself put your metaphorical finger into your metaphorical gaping open wound by looking at vacation photos of them and their new beau? Jesus Christ, why do we always look? Why do we feel as though we have to not block or unfriend someone who has shredded our heart like paper so that we can appear unbothered or mature? Remember when we were younger and we broke up with someone we didn’t see them or talk to them anymore or know how their hair looked blowing in the wind of a passing el train or how happy they look laughing at a candlelit bar IN REAL TIME and then want to gouge our own eyeballs out and perform emotional self immolation? Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord and it looks just like the block button, the unfollow, the get the fuck out of the data waves floating around me at every second of every day.

This is what I mean when I say ignorance is bliss. And not just when it comes to people. The land of social media is so polluted with poorly or unsourced material and misdirection. Social media makes us sad. An overload of information at our fingertips makes us sad. Not taking the time to get to know one another makes us inadvertently sad. Not closing the door all the way on things that make us sad MAKES US SAD. Bliss is no easy feat-the dictionary defines it as perfect happiness and complete joy so let’s get fucking real. Let’s be ignorant and maybe get a little bit closer to a modicum of happiness.