The Wisdom of Seinfeld
Comedy club – Jerry on stage with the opening monologue (Episode 47-The Bubble Boy)
JERRY: Have you ever called someone up, and you’re disappointed when they answer the phone? You wanted the machine. You know, and you’re always kind of thrown off, (left hand up to side of face, pretending its a receiver) you go “Oh, I eh, I – I didn’t know you were there, I ah – just wanted to leave a message saying, sorry I missed you.”
Commentary from Seinology.com: “So here what we have is two people who hate each other, don’t really ever want to talk, but the phone machine is like this relationship respirator keeping these marginal brain dead relationships alive. And we all do it — Why? So that when we come home, you can see that little flashing red light. You go “all right, messages.” You see, people need that. It’s very important for human beings to feel they are popular and well liked amongst a large group of people that we don’t care for.” [Source: Seinology.com]
Let’s update all of this a bit and relate it to our addiction to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Why do we even accept friend requests from people we hardly know? Because it’s cool to be “popular”–or at least “virtually popular.” Facebook shows you when someone posts on your wall or makes a comment on one of your photos, and it’s an exciting thing isn’t? Sometimes people post strange, ambiguous status updates that beg for hundreds of responses such as, “OMG something bad has happened. More info later.” Human curiosity kicks in and all of a sudden you’ve got a gazillion comments on your page. Job well done.
In reference to the “relationship respirator” comment from Seinology.com it’s also interesting to note that Facebook puts 95% of your “friends” on a relationship respirator. If it wasn’t for this social networking site you would be out of touch with most of these people. Wouldn’t know how to reach them or find them. The relationship would have run it’s natural course and you would have grown apart. Facebook disturbs the natural progression of social connections. It’s impossible to get rid of someone now–unless you have the cajones to “de-friend” the person (which is like the ultimate insult nowadays).
Am I a cynic? Maybe. Do I have 300+ friends on Facebook? Yes. Do I get what’s really going on? Totally. I think bottom-line that is the most important thing. Just don’t go into all of this wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. Know what you are getting into and start to find peace in not having a ton of messages waiting for you. If you’re not wasting time with a bunch of people you don’t like you’ll find that you have more time to do things on your “bucket list”.
