Only during the night, only in Facebook

“Geez, Ice Age 3 was fun, nkkwala ng stress.”

“Dinner tayo bro.”

“Boring night, sin-o unli da?”

“wud?” (What are you doing?)

“Musta na?”

“Care 2 txt?”

I have this gnawing suspicion that my friends and even those whose numbers are not in my phonebook but who give me unsolicited advices on life, love, and anything they think is worth sending are either subscribed to Smart unlimited text promo or just blatantly declaring to the world how bored they are with their lives, or both.

Twitter might have been invented as a response to our generation’s  itch to broadcast our boredom, and Facebook’s Rock Your World’s  (formerly Wall) reason for being is also this, I believe.

Is this virtual sharing of our common experience with boredom that keeps our generation together? We are a lot of young men and women whose idea of a community is far from what our parents had during their time. We spend our day working and earning for a living then go home every night tired and sleepy. But not wanting to lose our connection with the world and with our friends we log on to Facebook and there, in a futile attempt, we punish the world with our lashing, ranting and banter. There we find a place where we can all be blithe college students again who care less about the inner mechanism that drives the world outside the academe, the reality that we unwillingly trap ourselves in now.

And so we give up our carefree and lighted-hearted character when we were 20, now projecting the sensibilities of an about-to-be jaded corporate slave whose only weapons are witty one-liners we hope others like us will comment on, a 180-character Twitter update of an insipid dinner, a date, or a deadline we die to beat, or a blog article hurriedly written to dislodge the excreta in our minds that has accumulated throughout the day.

We do it every night. As if it is the only time of the day we are allowed to be ourselves. As if only on the pages of Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, or our blog are we allowed to speak our minds. As if these thoughts matter at all.