Dirty Little Secret

We often happen to stumble upon lesser known or obscure things.  A beautiful song that people around you don’t know of, an astounding little movie, maybe foreign language, maybe an indie flick that you happen to tumble across while WebHiking (A silly term I coined for randomly cliking links on a page and then links of those pages and so on….for all I know there may actually be a technical term for it), or a mindblowing/numbing book that you feel is a must read.  And often we immediately go and show it to other people and share it with them.  And at other times, we just don’t.  We keep it to ourselves, as our special secret that only we can enjoy.  It’s like Alice’s entrance to the wonderland, a special secret she had among her friends and family that made her mundane, dreary life a little more bearable.

   The same things get shared on the social networking sites.  The same meme, the same joke, the same dumb video, the same nonsensical, nasal twanged, irritating song (wha?? Kolaveri? What’s that?).  Everyone is talking about the same things, liking and discussing and sharing the same stuff.  That’s why we like to hold onto our little discoveries, our little secrets that we begin to hold dear.

We often even tend to lose sight of what are our original tastes.  Our actual likes and dislikes.  Whatever happens to be different and hitherto undiscovered, it becomes dear to us.  We may not actually even like it.  But we hold it dear all the same only because it creates a delusional, ectoplasmic curtain that separates us from the others.  In averting an identity crisis, we slip into any available identity that is outwardly unique.  And that, I believe, is the fatal mistake.  Because not being influenced by others also means not being negatively influenced.  If apathy is bad, overreacting is equally dangerous.