Empathy is The Future of the Internet

Everything is “ingenuine" on the internet, at least to a certain degree. An emphasis is made to the word “ingenuine” as it is an urban, slang word not merely an actual one, but there’s no other lexicon in the dictionary that can effectively portray the state of social media.

The platforms that innovated the way we connected to new people and the ones we’ve lost touch with — also caused the innate atrocity against people’s emotions and social (mis)understanding.

The aggregate consensus is that a filtered world of Snapchat’s effect, Instagram’s sticker’s, and Facebook’s proliferation of fake news is today’s youth saddening reality.

To be fair, it’s not merely on the youth or the millennials, that’s an immense misconception and a myth that is utterly discriminatory.

This phenomenon that has been life altering takes no specific age, gender, and color as a victim — all it takes is a Wifi connection.

Reflection and solitude is a lost art that is critical for the people before the internet age to find your own self, nowadays, it’s almost impossible to shut yourself from the world around you when everything around you seems to shove itself unto you.

The craft of the many languages of non-verbal expression is lost amidst a sea of emojis. The pursuit to understand empathy is critical now more than at any points in the course of our existence. You want to fix the internet? Teach people to genuinely empathize, not a mere disheartened apathy.

Clicking “Add friend” or “Following” someone is a connection for sure but to what extent? We should strive for a lasting bond and the feeling of taking a risk whether that relationship is lasting, not merely impermanent, fleeting at a click of a button.

We need to strike a delicate balance between the easiness of connecting online to the effort required in forming a true bond. Valuing the nuance of every interaction and to ascertain that there’s a sense of tangibility in an otherwise abstract construct.

Empathy goes far beyond sympathy, it’s an emotion that is integral to go way past the obvious and use imagination to fully understand someone’s resolve. We all have worries and trepidations, it’s a melancholic idea, as humans are emotional beings, more effort is needed.