Tag Archives: timothy leary would have loved facebook

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”  Face it, you even

Dr. Timothy Leary, 1920-1996

want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”

― Timothy Leary

Leary was half right.  Nobody wants to hear what makes you cry.  In fact, if people start telling me what makes them cry, I want them to shut the fuck up.  But, there is a lack of serious, meaningful conversation in our lives and it’s difficult to make that happen.

Leary apparently thought we could make it happen by adding a bit more meaning to our conversational gambits, being more open to random conversations with strangers, and maybe dropping a tab of LSD now and again.

Leary died in 1996.  The internet already existed, but social media hadn’t really taken off yet.  So,  he can hardly be faulted for not realizing the potential of it.  Social media allows us to ask questions like “what is deja vu for?” and maybe get a serious conversation going on the subject.  Maybe not, because we’re not even entirely sure it exists, but that’s just one example.

Of course, 98% or more of what you see on facebook and twitter and all the rest is still “Hi, how are you, doesn’t this weather suck, here are some cute pictures of my kid or some pictures of where I spent my vacation or some stupid video with cats” or other stuff which does not really enhance our experience in this life on Earth, or advance the course of human progress.

But it’s not about the percentages, it’s about the numbers.  2% of the traffic out there is meaningful, and anybody who wants to can seek that out and respond to it and add to it.  It helps us to communicate with each other in ways that we never could before.

Timothy Leary would have loved facebook.