The Irony of the Elderly Facebooker

We all will...

Your eyes water in tearful rage as you look upon the highlights of your acquaintances' daily lives. Day in and day out, you have browsed through the collection of selfies, statuses that irritate you with their mindlessness, and ads for shirts that mysteriously have your last name on them. "If I receive one more invitation to Candy Crush, I'm going to go drown the first stray cat I find," you mumble to yourself, your eyes glassy as the very screen you have been looking at for the past two hours. Finally, you decide you have had enough. You vow to yourself that you shall "never Facebook again," and as you hover over that "Delete Account" button, you pause for a second. You wonder if cutting yourself off from the social media lifeline will be worth it. Then you think of that time your neighbor posted pictures of his cat's ear infection and you click the "ok".

     The other day I was ruminating upon some absurdly trivial issue, when I realized that my train of thought had been silly. I was incredibly pleased with myself for thinking through my thought process to a rational conclusion, instead of taking the Night Train Express to Sillyville. Accordingly, with a new spring of pride in my step, I continued my activity. The irony (verily the rub of it to wax Shakespearean) is that I say silly stuff all the time, but I guess it's those little victories of life. 

     To combine these seemingly unrelated paragraphs, Facebook is a waste of time. You won't win any arguments about that one. HOWEVER, it is definitely the little things that keep us sane; those delicious little ironies that lead to great satisfaction (speaking of which, I'm resisting the urge to spin into a tangent about how I really doubt that the Rolling Stones couldn't get ANY satisfaction whatsoever, or pointing out that the song used a double negative...so Mick Jagger was really singing about how he could get satisfaction...). The great irony of life that is most pronounced on Facebook is the Irony of the Elderly Facebooker. 

TELL 'EM, SALLY

It seems that my generation was the last to really be taught to respect our elders. I was thinking about that the other day because, well, I think about random stuff. We respect our elders because of their experience in life. The irony of the elderly facebooker lies in their lack of experience in social media.

Disclaimers...

For some of us, our parents and grandparents refuse to get on Facebook. It's only recently that they've really exploded onto the scene. I use the term "exploded" a little tongue-in-cheek because they often write like this:

Am I in trouble? No it's just grandpa again

The endless cycle of reminiscence

Bam.

After all the capitalizations, using company pages as Google to get directions and coupons, and "omniposting" (commenting on anything their relatives ever post), we of course still love them. Because we love them we can laugh and/or weep about the crazy stuff they do.

I don't know, though. Some of their "mis-facebookings" seem pretty suspect. They are probably sitting around their fireplaces, chortling to themselves as they drink expensive wine and write these things.  The joke is probably on us.

~Worley