Nowadays, we’re practically hard wired into the Internet and the majority of our day to day life can now be carried out via a device which fits in the palm of our hands. We can pay our bills, order our shopping, make friends, watch movies and fall in love without even having to step outside of our house as long as we have a wifi connection and a battery life (bad news for those of us playing Pokemon Go).

We can stay in contact with loved ones, friends, people we’ve worked with, people who’ve moved abroad and even people who we’ve never met. We can iMessage, phone call, Snapchat, FaceTime, we can watch life progressions and share important milestones or holiday snaps on Facebook or see what they had for lunch on their Instagram feed, yet despite living in an era where we’re connected to the world by a mere click of a button or a swipe of phone screen, we appear to have lost the ability to communicate with each other one on one. So why is it that in an age where we’ve never been more connected to one another, we’ve never been more disconnected?

The art of communication is soon becoming obsolete and instead of taking the time to sit down with our partner because you feel like they don’t make time for you anymore or that friend to tell them that they’ve been acting like a bit of a dick lately, we bypass that personal touch and instead choose to express how we really feel via the power of Comic Sans font set against the backdrop of a bokeh field or aside a picture of a Minion wearing a bike helmet.

SERIOUSLY.  WTF EVEN IS THAT?

Now don’t get it twisted, I’m the last person to preach about quotations and extracting sentences/entire segments of dialogues from my favourite films and storing them away for one rainy day when I those words are exactly what I need to hear because that’s 90% the decor of my house. But attempting to address or heal a real hurdle in your everyday life by way of a thinly veiled or cryptic message directed at someone on your timeline is different.  Especially when it becomes a daily occurrence.

I can scroll through a person’s timeline and every second post is a quote detailing the various stages of their mind implosion including being able to identify the time and place that everything veered off course and subsequent fall out.  All directed at seemingly the same person.

What has it come to the point when your friend no longer chooses to ring you in the middle of the night or ask to meet for coffee to talk to confide in you about their life drama?  Instead you only learn of their current life drama because of a thinly veiled quote they posted on Facebook or because of an influx of “you okay hun?” comments on her latest quote.

I’m reminded at this point of Tom Hansen’s monologue in 500 Days of Summer where he bashes the Greetings Card industry…

“Actually. You know what? Can I say something about the cat? Yeah, uh, this is- and Rhoda, no disrespect here….but, um, this is total shit. “Go for it” and “You can do it”? That’s not inspirational. That’s suicidal. (Points to the greeting cards) If Pickles goes for it there, that’s a dead cat. These are lies. We’re liars….think about it. Why do people buy these cards? It’s not because they wanna say how they feel. People buy these cards because they can’t say how they feel or they are afraid to. We provide the service that lets them off the hook. And you know what? I say the hell with it. I say let’s level with America. At least let them speak with themselves. I mean, look at this. What does it say? Congratulations on the new baby. How about congratulations for your new baby, guess that’s it for hanging out. Nice knowing ya buddy. Wait, what’s this? Ooh… fancy!”

If you’re having a hard time in life, what you need right now isn’t a borrowed quote posted onto Facebook/Twitter/Instagram. Find the way to say in your own words what you want to say and to the people you want to say them to or to make the changes you want to change. What you need right now is time and the opportunity to air your grievances. To rid your mind of these pent up thoughts that you for some reason feel you can only communicate through a minion to a social network of people who will most likely only scroll past your heartache in the search for cute puppies or sneezing Pandas.