For a people person, it has surprised me how much I have lost my tolerance for the world recently, or less generally, the people in it. Or, to be really specific, the people that I categorise as my friends.
And don’t get me started on my family.
You deserve a better explanation, so here it is. And in true Dave style I shall ramble, beat about the bush, probably rant a bit, and hopefully make you grin on the way.
The reports of my death, etc.
Please allow me to take you on a short journey through my slightly damaged psyche.
I don’t know whether it is my age, or the state of my mental health, or maybe even because of both, but I have become more aware over the last few years, that one of my major triggers is the idea that my persistence in people’s minds is directly influenced by how necessary I am to their needs. Or more specifically:
Do you ever wonder how long it would take for people to notice that you were gone? Have you ever suddenly thought about somebody you haven’t thought about for a long time, only to discover that they died years ago?
Ironically, with it being this time of year, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life last week, which deals with this very idea: “What difference have I made in this world?”
Before I get to the point I’m trying to make, there is one more tale to share with you. A few months ago I was taking a shower and my phone rang. I jumped out of the shower to answer the phone only to find it was some random “friend” I hadn’t heard from for a long time, just asking me if I was driving my taxi, presumably because they were unable to get one as quickly as they would have liked.
Still covered in soap and slightly annoyed, I stepped back into the bath to continue my shower in peace. My left foot went one way and my right foot went the other, causing me to slide forward, head first into the bath, banging my head on the wall. A millisecond after the stars subsided from my vision I started to laugh, mainly because of the amusing image that was in my head. As I was hanging out of the bath arse first, I was wondering how funny it would have been (in a terrible way of course) to have been found like this – that this was, ultimately, the form of my demise.
You see, the final thing that I would really like to happen to me, is a funny death. I want people to talk about my passing and be unable to stop themselves from laughing at the method of my destruction. I remember watching a celebrity being interviewed once on TV, and if I remember correctly, they wanted to be crushed by “a giant letter O from the Hollywood sign.” They weren’t specific about which of the three Os it would be. Any would do, I suppose.
So here I am, face down, arse up in my bath, laughing to myself about being found like this after a few days, and then it struck me. How long would it actually be until I was found? How long would it take to be missed? Could I get the person that rang my phone to serve time for my manslaughter? The irony of my demise being caused by being eventually needed for something other than my sparkling personality is not lost on me.
I think all we ever really want to do is persist. It is said that when we pass, we remain (or some version of us) in the minds of the people we leave behind. And while that gives us comfort when we need it, it’s not really true is it? We live on in the neurons of maybe the few thousand people that we have interacted with, but once those people have turned to dust, where do we go then?
You see, these are the sort of thoughts that keep me awake.
- People only think about you if you can help them solve a problem
- You will only be missed if people need you for something.
I think where I am going with this, is that I’ve got this enormous sense of isolation, but I don’t really mind as much as I used to. I am at peace with it.
My Facebook account got hacked for the first time over the weekend. It was during a taxi journey in the middle of the night while I had passengers in the car. I started to get strange notifications on my phone, so I knew what was going on. By the time I dropped my passengers off, the damage had been done, I could no longer get into my account, and shortly after that the perpetrators had also used my account to get it completely disabled for doing whatever those scumbags do.
So when my Facebook account got disabled, I saw the potential for an interesting social experiment – to see how long it would take for anyone to notice, and how many, if any?
The results of this experiment surprised me.
It took around eight hours to be missed online, by a grand total of 2 people. It is over two days later now, and this total has not increased at all.
It’s a bittersweet statistic. On the one hand, I was missed fairly quickly, but on the other, only by two people. And neither of them needed a taxi.
At the time of writing I am still undecided as to whether I am going to attempt to recover my Facebook account. You see, a fair few use Messenger to contact me when they can’t get a taxi.
After my “bathmageddon” incident, my phone is pretty much permanently on Do Not Disturb. In my free time I am almost never contacted unless I am needed for something other than myself. Honestly it’s been quite liberating. Every so often I’ll look at my phone and see a few missed calls and messages, which I can contemptuously snort at, at my leisure, when I’ve got a few moments to spare.
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