We live in a world in which a perfectly ironed shirt, a designer suit, trendy glasses and an expensive perfume can open many doors. If you know how to fake a smile despite the truth of a rotten tooth behind it, if you can throw in some foreign expression during a conversation even though you don’t know the grammar or the spelling of your mother tongue, if you casually mention some exotic destination you have travelled to even though you have no idea what the sights of your own country are, you will be able to open doors, even those which carry the name of a CEO on a silver plate.
Kind words used to open iron doors. Nowadays, those kind words have been replaced by some new, often foreign words, which need to sound “intelligent”, and those iron doors have now been replaced by silver matte doors of luxury cars or those guarded ones of some fancy night clubs. Those new words, high-sounding but echoing with emptiness, create new business opportunities for wheeler-dealers, make upstarts forget about their humble beginnings and sometimes even make the easy ones spread their legs and drop their morals. If you are in doubt which words I refer to exactly, these are the ones to remember. In the urban category the following words are prominent: bro, old man, chilling, crib, MTH, swag, yolo, while corporate “in” words and phrases are: casual Friday, think outside the box, take it offline, synergize, unplug, let’s talk that.
The SELFIE generation is on the rise. The time when fiction mongers fell into the category of liars has passed. Now’s the time when the most important thing is to sell yourself. Look your best in photos, always be in the right place at the right time and hang out with influential people, be in hotspots with big shots. Those influential people are the same mere mortals as everyone else, but with unjustifiably huge egos and not prone to self-criticism. Once people used the expression “an eye for an eye”, and now it’s #Follow4follow #Like4like.
Photo: Dimitri Daniloff
Everyone is living Instagram lives. In photos, no one looks good enough, because everyone is trying to look and not trying to be. There everyone is rich, they are all happy and having fun, they are always smiling, travelling, dipping their toes and making duck faces. All that would not be so bad if there was a little truth in it. Instead of really living in those moments which we can share later, we have started staging moments which we don’t live in so we could brag about them on social networks.
Next thing that happens is that everyone is friends with everyone else but nobody really knows each other, everyone’s flirting with everyone else, but no one is really waking up next to someone, everyone is trying to be special without realising that they all look the same because of it. Most people claim they are capable of doing anything, but they do nothing. They say they would be able to do anything if given an opportunity, but nobody is doing anything to make that opportunity possible. Everybody is speaking at the same time and they don’t hear one another, everyone has an opinion but nobody cares about anyone else’s. All people speak a lot but rarely listen, even though we all have two ears and one mouth, so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
I read the advice of a distinguished author the other day, who says that you should “Fake it until you make it”. All the misfortune of our time lies in that advice. Not only do our lives pass in the desire to succeed and acquire as much as possible, but now they advise us we should fake it. And the truth is so simple…If you can’t be happy with what you have, you will not be happy even when you have what you’ve been missing.
Translated from the Serbian by Svetlana Milivojević-Petrović
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Ovaj post je dostupan i na: Serbian
