Why You Shouldn't Delete Everybody

There is this narrative floating around encouraging people to cut out negative energy and people from their lives. Ideally, it makes a lot of sense. If there are toxic people in your life, it is healthy to protect yourself from negativity. That, I get.

The problem I am seeing, however, is the misuse of the narrative. I see more and more people use it as an excuse to justify our tendency to throw others away. It is no secret that the prevalence of social media as a major form of communication has altered our ability to interact with humans in real time. Combine those diminished social skills with the convoluted self-care narrative that may as well translate to "cut out others that don't share your opinions" and we have a generation that doesn't know how to accept human shortcomings or differences.

This is disheartening because: 1) No one popped out of Moms knowing the ins and outs of social injustices or government propaganda. We all learn our bits of knowledge at different points of our lives. Just because a person doesn't know it now, doesn't mean they won't get it later. 2) There is a level of intellectual elitism attached to these incidents. We have taken the resource of information and used it to create a social ranking system of the wokes and the woke-nots. Not only does it seem hypocritical to sever ties with someone with a different knowledge base, it can also be divisive.

Again, this is not to say that we should subject ourselves to people who are abusive or forceful with their views. But we do need to practice coexistence in the absence of absolute agreement.

We are living in a country that provides a plethora of comforts and distractions as it slowly takes away and amends our civil rights. There may very well be a day when we will need to unify to fight for our freedoms. We'd be able to cross a lot more waters with unburned bridges. Let's start learning to unify in spite of differences now.