Dear Yak,
I know this person who’s constantly posting lots of “poor me” stuff on Facebook. If she’s not sick, she’s either unemployed or depressed or hungover or has a mosquito in her bedroom at 3am.
Every time she does this, she gets a wave of digital sympathy, attention and “hang in there” messages. But the other day I was in a bad mood, so when she posted that she was feeling lousy because she had the flu, I replied with “who cares?”.
This immediately opened a big can of Facebook worms with lots of her admirers jumping to her defence. But I reckon I was just expressing what a lot of other people were thinking anyway.
What do you think, Yak? If people are going to post self absorbed stuff like that, then they should expect some teasing.
Yours sincerely,
You’re Not That Interesting
Dear You’re Not That Interesting,
You’re absolutely right. It’s one of the first rules of social media. I realised many years ago that no-one cares about your pain unless you can turn it into a joke or a poem or a country and western song.
That’s why I released ‘My Four Stomaches are Aching’ a few years ago via my own record label, Hoofs And Horns (HAH). I used my musical creativity and turned a nasty bout of bovine gastro-enteritis into an ‘80s-inspired ballad with an upbeat bubbly tempo and a contrasting wistful melody. It didn’t make it into any of the charts though. Globally. But I’m not bitter about that. Not a bit. Bitter.
Hope this helps.
With kind regards,
The Yak
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