Daily Times

We all have those people in our lives, don’t we?

The ones who send you that friend request on Facebook, and while you have no idea who he is you still accept because you have many common friends, and oh, he’s from your school, and apparently from the same class, although you have no recollection of him at all!

So now you’re friends. Well, Facebook friends at least. And that person just sits there.

Sits there on your friends list. He never comments on your posts, he just lurks in the background. He’s watching your every move, every post. Like that shark in Jaws? With the music playing faster as he swims in the fringe of your Facebook life. That life that you share with your family and real friends.

And he’s watching your every move. Weighing your every post. Building an opinion of you. Judging you.

Social media has its advantages but can it encapsulate you in your entirety? Can you gauge people’s depth and nuances and complexities just by their posts? Can you see the pain and the heartache and the emotions behind them accurately enough to know someone just from their social media accounts? Are we humans such simple creatures to be captured completely and measured by our social network accounts? After all, am I not more than what I post?

But that new Facebook ‘friend’ lacks the capacity to know you so he’s building a mental image of you based on what he sees on your account. Facebook gives him a rough skeleton of who you, are and he starts to fill in the flesh by plugging in pieces of his own mind. His own persona. He builds your face on that frame provided by your profile picture. Putting in eyes that are dreamt up by his own mind. And cheeks. And hair. And lips. And hands. And feet.

So things get weird. Really weird. You see by now he’s built a monster. It is not unlike the monster in Mary Shelly’s book. It is built by parts salvaged from the graveyard of his own mind. So he transplants onto you an arm dug up from one demented grave in his brain, and a leg from another. He would conjure up a bolt going through your neck and the scars across your forehead. And he would add even that stiff-legged walk with arms outstretched.

You are that monster dug up by his demons of schizophrenia and coloured by his own experiences of a life less lived. He’s even got a tiny hunchbacked Igor in his disturbed brain running around screaming “it’s alive! it’s alive!”

So that’s how he builds a ‘you’. A monster you. It is a ‘you’ based on your social media posts where he was not privy to the personal joke that was intended for someone else, and on that work accomplishment that you shared with colleagues to try and build encouragement.

With the monster conveniently built he brings out the pitchforks and the torches. And he attacks. He attacks with fury and with vengeance. After all, we hate monsters, don’t we? Especially the ones that carry pieces of our own blackened soul with them, wearing skin imagined by us and clothed in our own perceived failures. And imagined monsters are the worst kind. Ask all the master filmmakers!

You see it’s far more convenient to find fault with others than to turn that critical eye upon yourself. So they assail your every post. Condemn your every sentence, and as soon as you block them they contact all those common school-friends, and share with them every imagined slight. Every dreamt up notion. They scream and rant and rave.

With him blocked you only find out all this obliquely, from photos or posts by other friends where he insists on commenting. The shrieks and rants grow louder and louder.

You’ve blocked him so there’s little else you can do. Step in and reply on those posts that you can see? I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re better than that. So you just sit there and bear it. Write an article about it, maybe? Send to a newspaper to have it published if it takes their fancy? That’s about it.

Meanwhile, the rants go on. By now he is tearing out his hair and foaming at the mouth. It’s quite ugly. And that’s when someone finally walks over to check if he is on some medication, wondering if he is overdosing on lithium.

Next day you get a call from him on your cell phone. He’s got his tail between his legs and whimpers: “Yaar, I’m so sorry about all those messages. I swear my account got hacked. It wasn’t me writing all that. Forgive me, I’m such a sh*t. Add me back on Facebook again, please.”

My suggestion? Don’t. Just hope they don’t reduce his medication again.

After all you wouldn’t want him to have an aneurysm now, would you?

Writer’s note: Recent studies have linked excessive social media use to chronic depression.

The writer is chairman of a Hedge Fund, and can be reached at muqtaza@gmail.com