Your End is Near, my Dear

The Mayans were wrong. The dark, menacing cloud of apocalypse did not dissipate. It still hovers over our heads and is waiting for 2017 to come crashing down.

It will be the most memorable year of our afterlife. A year that will see the demise of the stand-up comic, poet extraordinaire, cook, diva, avid photographer, in us. The lone soul who tirelessly spread cheer by sharing BBM jokes and motivated friends and frenemies with quotes will say bye-bye and never come back. It will be a slow, painful death. What can you expect when you’ll have no one to share your ‘feeling blessed/mad/bad/sad’ updates with! Hundreds of friends who you painfully collected and nurtured over the years with likes and superlikes, the sole purpose behind your album, Random Clicks, Vacationing in Goa – Part I, II,I II and IV - all gone with one masterstroke.

Of what use will be those selfies you click, standing in front of the mirror, hair carelessly falling over your cheek, head tilted at a 45 degree angle.

Click 1 – OMG! I look so fat.

Click 2 – Yikes! My nose looks like Mt. Vesuvius.

Click 3 – ARE THOSE WRINKLES?

Click 45 – Phew, finally a pic that does justice to my beauty.

The 129 likes, Ooh you hottie… Madem your becoming younger with age, comments were worth the nagging pain you now have in your shoulder, pointing your arm to the ceiling for over 30 minutes to get that perfect shot. The thought of taking a vacation will become unbearable, now that you’ll have no one but your hapless relatives and friends to show those awesome clicks of you standing in front of every shrub, monument and mall in Bangkok.

Why should I party, if I can’t show my virtual friends that I’m not a pathetic soul who spends all day on Facebook but manage to have a rocking time in real life!

Those morons from Princeton are claiming that Facebook will fade out and die by 2017, just like the bubonic plague. The social network’s popularity that spread like an infectious disease over the years will see a downslide, because we’re slowly becoming immune to its charms.
 

Image Courtesy - berkunair.com

It is also being claimed that teens don’t find FB cool anymore and are migrating to Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp. Ironically, it’s the parents who couldn’t stop bemoaning their teen’s addiction to this platform are the ones pushing them away by sending them friend requests and putting them off with their new-found devotion to Facebook.

Bro, it’s so not cool to see your Mom pout. 



Agreed, Facebook now resembles a Sooraj Barjatiya set with our relatives and their relatives having made an appearance in our friends list. It starts with you accepting an innocuous friend request from an Aunt and sooner than you can say ‘hum saath saath hai’ your cousin’s Mama’s chachee’s brother is commenting on your post ‘why women should have more sex’! It gets even more awkward when you discover your Dad’s “you look great” remark on a friend’s pic, flaunting her brand new figure in her brand new dress!

Trying hard to avoid your husband’s ‘I told you so’ look, you quickly get into damage control mode and put all your relatives in the restricted list and pray that they don’t read this post.

But Facebook is no bubonic plague. It’s our true soulmate that has seen us through our phases of distress and jubilation. Can you imagine the anguish of spending your birthday and anniversaries alone with just your family for company! With no one to tell how much your husband of 7 years means to you, with no one to brag about your daughter’s fantastic examination scores – life will become drab and boring, just like reality. We’ll have to go back to the drab ole days of having to rely on our memory to remember special occasions and make the effort of picking up the phone to wish our friends.

What will happen to the 1.1 billion displaced Facebook users, left with no excuse to waste time and no one to applaud their achievements! Our lives will be bereft of purpose when we’ll no longer be able to save deformed babies, rescue battered women, prevent cancer, stop corruption and massage our conscience, simply by clicking the like button. We’ll be moving around like zombies, with a vacant look, holding our profile pictures, poetry, Sai Baba blessings, stopping passers-by and begging for their likes.

Imagine your distress, when you’ll discover that it was Facebook and not you that was responsible for your spouse’s happiness! No words can express the smug satisfaction we get when a bald headed man from Croatia propositions us with “Hello, I like your sweet beautiful postures… It's really wonderful lady, seems like your a warm hearted woman? I think we will make a great relationship”. Or when you wake up to “how so sweet look” from a lovelorn Dev Khaana from Ambala.

No Candy Crush requests, no invites to try birthdays! Surely, our future can’t get darker than this?

Have I managed to freak you out? Good. Now I can come to the part when I start pacifying.

Facebook, true to its nature, has allayed our fears of its imminent destruction. They have assured us that with only half its current enrolment by 2018, and no students at all by 2021, it’s not them but Princeton that’ll shutdown.

Obviously, with so many pictures to share and stare at, so many cat videos to laugh at and so many causes to support and like, who has time for education. And who needs Princeton, when we have University of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get our Bachelors in Time-pass and Masters in Narcissism from!

And hey, if Facocalypse does happen, we can always migrate to greener pastures and become addicted to the fresh new taste of its grass.

Remember what happened when Orkut started resembling Jhumritaliya?