Social media sucks these days! What was a great way to connect with the people you care about is now a vain mechanism to impress unknown dipshits who couldn’t care less whether you live or die. You become a caricature of yourself to please their whims, all while consuming sensationalized information and entering a feedback loop that ramps up your negative emotions until baseline happiness and your sense of self are depleted. We need to return to a simpler, better age: when the only social media was an army officer riding to your farm on horseback to tell you that your son was blown to bits by General Lee’s artillery at Gettysburg.

Notice how intuitive and uncomplicated this setup was. You didn’t have to plug into the internet, register your email setting off years of spam down the road, or pay for any subscription services. There was no algo-speak or self-censorship like “your kiddo was heckin unalived, sir.” Nobody felt the need to tell the world all the complicated emotions they felt about tragedy. It was just an army officer telling you that your son was killed at Gettysburg.

Next, there was no inhumanity from hiding behind a screen to say lurid things. No cheering for another human being’s death or mistreatment, at least overtly. Interactions were genuine and sincere, and we communicated as human beings. We never needed to concern ourselves with complicated problems we could never solve, because the only problem on your mind was that your son was killed.

In those days, people wrote to inform, not to manipulate. “Content” was something you grew, bought, and sold with your two hands, and only religious-revival fire-and-brimstone pastors engaged in what we now know as doomscrolling. We solved boredom with hard work, not by reading K-pop stan Twitter. Life was tough and you didn’t obsess over it, even if an Army man told you your son was killed.

Because of how mindless we’ve allowed ourselves to become, from TV’s “idiot box” to the present-day “brainrot,” I call for a return to the social media of yore. No “aura farming” or being “performative,” but genuine communication that puts our basic need for human connection and sincerity above entertainment or satisfaction. One day, maybe not long from now, instead of watching a Disney remake of a remake on your smart fridge, you’ll hear about actually important things from your hologram transmission, like how your son was blown to bits by laser drones in Taiwan.