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Good conversations and the eternal sadness of being human

/ andyveilleux / Leave a comment

I've been having a lot of conversations lately, with a bunch of people with differing opinions. I've talked about purpose in life, Hemingway, Jung, Bukowski, the ADHD generation I am coming up in, intellectual boredom and stagnation, the difference between academic and public writing, and most important, the overall sadness that invades daily life.

There's a certain sadness to the daily events of life. Not specifically, because it's nothing you can put you finger on, but generally. It's not an overwhelming sadness.

It doesn't team up with the other negative emotions to push you down. It waits in the background most of the time. Occasionally, you can let it out of its cage, and play with it until you're both satisfied. It then will return to its cage and wait your next moment of weakness. In this way, it is like that ex-girlfriend, or friend-you-slept-with-and-sort-of-regretted-who-won't-go-away.

A lot of conversation has centred around what causes this sadness, and whether it will ever go away. I don't think it ever really goes away. The dull pain is probably always going to be there behind my ears. Maybe that's what got to Hemingway and Hunter S. Thomson.

Maybe it comes down to knowing that eventually we're all going to die. Our bodies can only continue for so long, and then the show's over. Good-bye Andy consciousness, you'll be gone for good one day. Hell, the whole species is doomed for that matter.

That's the eternal sadness of being human. It may be the only part of us that survives.

There is an emotion that teams up with that overall sadness well; loneliness. The feeling, or even thought, of being alone. To quote Bukowski, "there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock." The clocks have gone digital, the loneliness has to.

Now we sit around on MSN, Facebook, Twitter, just waiting for that message to lead us to salvation, away from loneliness. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't; but it never lasts. 

It's quicker than ever to get in touch with someone, but it's harder than ever to hold their attention and time. How much spectacle is acceptable in one's life to keep on entertaining, without becoming the jester?

Some nights are harder than others.

Life after Facebook, and why you need to get on Twitter

/ andyveilleux / Leave a comment

 

Hi everyone, I wanted to change up my usual blogging routine by offering you a guest-blog from a friend of mine, Matt Southern. His story is a fairly interesting one, as he is a PR graduate, who decided to delete his Facebook account months ago, and only keep his Twitter. Without further adieu:

Twitter is one of the most powerful tools of the post-modern era for communicating with individuals and reaching an audience. It’s direct and succinct with unmatched user-friendliness and accessibility. However, after over a year of being an avid twitter user I’ve discovered one simple truth about the social networking service: it’s not for everyone.

Too often I’ve seen people join twitter only to post a few dozen tweets before abandoning the service altogether. To them I would say they’re doing it wrong. You could argue that they didn’t give it a chance but I would argue that they never learned how to use it to suit their needs. It’s remarkable how in 140 character updates there’s truly something out there for everyone.

To get the most out of your experience on Twitter you have to decide what you seek to gain from it. If keeping up with current events is as important to you as it is to me then you need not look any further. There’s no denying it’s one of the best news services available, I almost always get breaking news on Twitter before I get it anywhere else. However, the people who sign up only to follow their favorite celebrities and athletes may never discover that it’s actually a very useful news source.

If you’re a creator of digital content such as a blogger, vlogger, graphic designer, writer of short stories etc. there’s no better way to directly reach an online audience than through Twitter, especially if you’ve built up a healthy number of followers. Similarly, if you’re a consumer of content and like to keep up with your favorite bloggers, youtubers and graphic artists then you can do that as well.

One of my personal favorite ways to use Twitter is as a personal contact maker. I love connecting with people who are passionate about the same things I am. Twitter offers me that opportunity that I otherwise wouldn’t get in real life. For example, living in a small Canadian city where Hockey is the sport of choice it’s difficult to connect with people who are as passionate as I am about pro wrestling and mixed martial arts. Twitter provides me an outlet to share my thoughts and opinions with hundreds of people who are just as passionate, many of whom I’ve developed friendships with even though we’ve never met.

Additionally, as a Public Relations grad and current student of Communications I aspire to have a career involving social media one day. I value Twitter as a business contact maker as I’ve connected with many PR professionals and look to them for guidance as I prepare to begin my career in the next year or so.

After a while I became so satisfied with my Twitter experience that I did what others would believe to be unthinkable: I deleted my Facebook account. Quite simply, it wasn’t doing it for me for me anymore. I see the utilitarian value in Facebook for keeping in touch with friends and family but there’s numerous other ways to do that. E-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, or even good old-fashioned phone calls to name a few. If you take that aspect away there was nothing else to keep me coming back. I wasn’t getting any valuable news updates that I couldn’t otherwise get on Twitter. I wasn’t making any new connections because Facebook doesn’t offer the ability to view what people all over the world are talking about. I had a very limited audience to introduce to new blogs I was writing at the time. Plus, the privacy issues were starting to get to me so I felt the time was right to delete my account altogether. I haven’t looked back since. Twitter more than satisfies my social networking needs and I still keep in touch with everyone I used to while I had Facebook, proving that life does indeed go on.