Insights

The Internet is blinded by the light.

Extreme darkness leads to blindness; so does extreme light.

Anything extreme towards the opposite spectrum of polarities is dangerous.

There was a time in the late 90s and early 2000s when people would go online to ask for things. Information.

Today they hop on the bandwagon of information.

Information is fed not served. Without asking for it, by the faceless creators who have millions of followers.

Yet their names are unknown. They are unknown and cannot be recalled.

Do you remember the name of the creator of the last viral reel you saw before coming here?

The insignificance of the identity of the creator is disastrous for the creator who remains mean what they say and for the creators who dive deep into what they explore for their audience.

The shallow content online has taken down the creators as a whole.

The word is tainted and everyone who uses this medium to communicate is labelled as “the guy who makes stuff online”.

Subjugation. Characterisation. Stereotypicalisation.

I may sound biased because I want to.

I don’t want to sit in the same line as monkey dancers and people who use this beautiful medium of the internet to polarise people. Politicians.

People who corrupt the minds of youth by promoting vulgarity to be cool.

I ask them to sit down and ask you the readers (who still invest time in activities that lack instant gratification) to stand up.

Do I want millions of followers? hell yes. I know it sounds contradictory.

Do I like the funny videos? hell yes, hell yes! I know it sounds contradictory too.

What do I want to say anyway?

Read on.

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Any creative being seeks for the light in the eyes of its audience.

For now, social media seems inevitable.

But it is utterly impossible to build a meaningful connection.

I went through the list of people I follow on Instagram for instance.

Most of them are friends who rarely post anything and the rest are the people who create content that makes me feel nothing significant.

Momentary.

On the contrary, the people I follow on Medium are the people I remember even when I am not on the site.

I recall Alex Mathers while taking a stroll in the garden and I ponder upon Smoul while sitting.

Something pops up and stands out about the writers on the medium.

Something very subtle yet magnificent.

Something. Just before going into the mindless state.

And that is the beauty of all of it.

I don’t know these people their bodies. But I know their minds in their words.

Words are the window to the mind. Mind is a window to the dynamic expression of nothingness.

Vast emptiness. Void. I meet these creators at the beginning of the creation.

This contemplation brings me to a very juxtapositioned juncture.

If I want the readers to come in fast, it won’t last.

If I want it to last, persistence and patience is the only way.

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Life mingles in the greys.

Nothing is happening right now.

All the glory and all the achievements are retrospective.

Once in a blue moon, there is an Oscar-winning situation in our life. And nothing happens even after that.

When I look at my writing career of about 5 years, and content-making career of almost 24 years, nothing has happened.

Meaning, I don’t consider myself a success in a conventional sense.

Whatever waves of opportunity surfaced in my career faded away.

What matters is the depths I fell into due to the stagnancy in moments.

Sometimes I stop on a word while reading and sink with it.

Lost and found at the same time.

It’s not the word that matters, but the blank space that comes after that.

Drip.

In this very moment where nothing is happening, I have found everything.

In the moments when I feel I have nowhere to go, I am everywhere.

True freedom for a man comes from acceptance of failure.

A point where he can’t sink any further in the grand scheme of things and only rise.

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There are no failures in life if we look at it from this perspective.

There is only potency for growth and growth.

The seed sprouts in the dark never knowing what the light looks like.

The river flows with consistency without bothering what it has done to the stone in the path.

The stone which stood there for millions of years is cut by the river which ever-flowing and everchanging.

So there are two findings to find here – Consistency and Acceptance to change.

I will flow and change regardless of my will.

It’s not about what I can ask from life, but more about what life has for me.

The borrowed aspirations and the number game on the internet are deviations from this realisation.

Nothing happens when you go viral.

I have gone viral many times on Reddit and faceless Instagram account.

It does not translate to what you are and who you are; let alone any compensation.

It has become a guru business to constantly push this idea that if you want to make it, make it on social media.

Very few views of this blog come from social media and more from the connections I have made with people.

There are people with millions of followers who can’t even gather 100 people in a room for an event.

It’s sad how the internet is maligned.

It galvanises an idea to the masses, spread from multiple accounts owned by the same actor.

I have lost interest in all of it.

I don’t want to raise my voice, I want to raise my words.

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Do I miss out on taking this stand as a person who creates?

Definitely.

If I don’t know how to reach my audience it makes my work incomplete.

But the crux of this conversation is reaching the right people.

Who genuinely share an interest with me. Who takes time to read?

I hate to see comments like “nice” and “very nice” and I strongly believe that these shallow minds have given a chance for a fundamentalist to rule the domain of the internet.

A whole arena seems to be taken away if social media is out of the equation.

But that is the point, it seems like.

The reality is that social media is dead long ago. People no longer express, the frabricate.

Social media is the cosmetic surgery of the internet.

And the impact is topical, not internal and eternal.

What’s the point in posting for the people who are never going to remember you?

They are gone even before watching your reel till the end.

I wish people get tired of social media as I have. I have withdrawn my interest from posting for organic reach and spending on inorganic traffic too.

Both are worthless and a complete waste of time, money and sanity.

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I will survive without accessive use of the internet.

I will be fine without having an agenda to be a people pleaser on X and Instagram.

I have survived.

The Pre-Google era of the internet. And yet I don’t consider myself old enough.

I am young enough to bend without breaking.

There are pockets on the internet that are the beacon of hope.

Expectations that prove the rule is wrong.

The rule of being everything for everyone on every platform out there.

The rule of social media.

We can do better folks. We can do better.

I am reading your words and listening to your mind’s voices in it.

A silent revolution that speaks without noise.

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Ahhh!

It feels light to declutter this mess. To take the burden of social media posts and schedules off my shoulders.

To find that nothing happens. And it’s okay.

I write if I want to understand something, and I write if I understand something.

That has never changed, only the spectrum has.

Like it does and it should.

I will survive and so will my work by sharing it, not to every random person on the internet; but by sharing it with a community of like-minded people.

We will agree and we will disagree. That is the beauty of life.

The contradiction is a symptom of being alive.

Life is not about gimmicks. But all about consistent honest attempts.

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