Destroy Sharebait, or A Pointed Attack On Negative Viral Culture And The Lie Of Faux-Inspirational Wank

Sharebait. It’s a term anyone who’s spent an extended time on social media, particularly Facebook will be familiar with, generally referring to the likes of Buzzfeed articles, posts with purposely inflammatory titles and statuses packed with emojis urging you to copy and paste. While they may clog up newsfeeds, most dismiss them as being harmless if irritating pieces of code. However there’s a darker, nastier side to this, found both in the cult of the passive-aggressive not-quite memetic images and that of the faux-deep, faux-inspirational images. They’re intrinsic parts of a negative culture, which does no favours to your mental health or relations with others. It’s an unnamed phenomenon, while there’s a slew of articles that deal with passive aggression on social media and this excellent Vice article that covers some of what I’m talking about somewhat better than I can, it still is an ongoing thing, a loop of the banal we’re trapped in.

 I’m not quite sure when the passive aggressive viral image first became a thing on Facebook, perhaps they’ve always been there, found on the sorts of pages one liked when they first got onto Facebook before discovering the joys of dank memes. They usually take the form of a stock photo with an aphorism related to the downsides associated with love and relationships placed on top. It’s the sort of message that’s fairly relatable to anyone who’s experienced the bad side of life, anyone who’s been rejected, or cheated on, or had friends turn on them. There’s little point in demonising those who like or share that sort of content, because the vast majority of us, at some point or another, have either done so or given a nod and a “same hun”.

While it might seem to be an overreaction to go off at a stupid aspect of social media, its prevalence represents a disturbing trend.  It represents the capitalisation of very real human insecurities as a means of gathering clicks, getting exposure for the various clickbaity and ad-strewn posts these pages indulge in. It provides a dangerous form of validation for the negative intrusive thoughts that often have little basis in concrete reality, that plague those with mental illnesses. As someone diagnosed with depression I really don’t need some picture of a person sitting pensively on a beach with text saying something along the lines of “your friends are all snakes” in Comic Sans, when really it’s all in my head, that there are people who are worried about me. They aren’t the cause of these negative ideas, or a major issue on a pic by pic basis. However they are part of a culture, they help to propagate ideas, little by little. The common sentiment expressed by them of “cutting negative people from your life” is one that’s not handled in the nuanced way it should be. It all too often supports the idea of cutting off friends who’ve done small shit to piss you off, or at worst severing ties with friends in mental distress for “killing your good buzz”. Cutting toxic people off is a necessary thing, but embracing it with the same gusto as the NKVD embraced shooting dissidents in Stalin’s time, and applying it with such reckless abandon is a very dangerous thing.  There are too many stories of stuff like this happening out there, we need to promote a more caring society rather than keep this vicious mentality intact. I’ve been very lucky by having friends who have stuck by me at my best and worst but not everyone is this fortunate.

 Another extremely problematic aspect  to  this plague is the cult of positive thinking. I’m not referring to the pics and memes that encourage you to keep your head up in hard times, that acknowledge how hard it can be. I’m talking about the ones that perpetuate the idea that positive thinking will fix every single problem. Shit like “the only disability is a bad attitude”, ones that encourage you to think positively during a mental breakdown despite the fact it is impossible to process anything. Recovery is painted as an easy process, and not the long, complex and mess one it really is. It keeps the idea that you can think your way out of any situation afloat. It fits into the idea of the quick fix, the fad diet that results in instantly weight loss, the self help book that fixes everything in your life. It does not take structural inequality, chronic mental illness or the complex and messy nature of human life into account, instead painting things in black and white. It’s an easily digestible narrative but one we need to get out of. We’re given this idea of seizing the day, an idea handed down from Dead Poet’s Society among other things, when that’s just really not feasible for everyone.  If you want to help someone recover, help them stick to small achievable steps that will add up over time. Don’t throw them in at the deep end and watch them flail away, criticising them for not thinking positively enough.

I’ve written before about my struggles with mental illness, during the period of sheer suffocating blackness that was my sixth year I had the idea that everything would be fixed once I got to college. I too bought into the idea of the quick fix. A new setting didn’t fix me completely, I’ve had some of my worst episodes in college. However what did help was the presence of support systems, having friends who were 10 minutes’ walk away rather  than me being trapped in my house, being able to talk to someone every day, even if it was small talk over a cigarette outside a building. Things have improved at a slow rate looking back on it. I haven’t relapsed into self-harm, or skulling naggings alone in my room. While I haven’t completely re-altered my life, I’ve gotten involved in things I never thought possible, like taking my poetry more seriously or getting involved in activism. While I’m still a long way away from being totally fine, for the most part I’m functioning, and I’ll take that.

So do I have a solution, a grand conclusion that will mend this societal ill? Well no, I’m just one voice amongst many spewing forth their views over binary code and bandwidth. Only thing I really feel comfortable offering as a solution is stop buying into the bullshit. The people who make this don’t care about you, they’re just capitalising on your very real and very human insecurities, a disgusting practice. Be empathetic towards people, always the best option to be honest. Honestly, I just hope by calling attention to this people do become aware of it and how damaging it can be, and little by little we can actually progress as a species.  Negativity can’t be killed off completely, it can only be managed really and that’s a goal we should be striving for.