Have You Been Left On The Seen?

We’ve all been through it before, something majorly exciting happens and you just can’t wait to tell the people who are important in your life about it. This happens across multiple platforms of social media such as Messenger and Snapchat. On one hand, it can be really disheartening to send something of importance and just get the ‘seen’ instead of an actual reply but on the other hand should we really care?

I’ve experienced the anxiety that can be coupled with sending a message and the looming possibility of getting hit with the ‘seen’. It’s something we all go through at some point and the level of anxiety we experience also depends on the recipient of the message. Depending on the person this anxiety can reach monumental levels. In hindsight, this is absolutely ridiculous. Should we really be obsessing with not getting an immediate reply to our messages on social media? But in the heat of the moment the stress of the situation can be absolutely crippling to the person who has sent the message.

Perhaps everything would just be easier if we just went back to a stage where we didn’t get read receipts or we didn’t know who had screenshotted our Snapchats. These features cause people all over the world so much stress, when 5 or 6 years ago, there was no such thing as read receipts, or snapchat. There was no way to tell if a friend had seen your message, and you just had to hope that they’d see it and reply at some point. I know to a younger person this would be the equivalent of going back to pre-historic times but if we managed to live with it 5 years ago, we can manage to live with it now and we’d probably ly be much better off as a society in the ways in which we interact with each other.

The main problem that arises from being left on the ‘seen’, is that people obsess over it, it creates gossip and causes rifts in friendships that shouldn’t be there, I’ve seen first-hand, relationships completely break apart over someone being left on the ‘seen’. But in this day and age is this what we should be focusing on in our daily lives? Every time we leave our homes we go out into a vast dangerous world yet the only thing we seem to focus on is how we interact with each other over the internet. If this is how the we’re going to progress as a race in the future perhaps we should reconsider our priorities as, from my perspective, nothing good will ever come from obsessing over getting hit with ‘seen’