The 'Tumblr Generation'

We are the Tumblr generation. I’m not completely addicted to it but I love the comments and fandom things that are shared via Facebook. There are so many posts about empowerment, disorders, even funny things, things that we all do. It really is great to educate people through personal experiences, because it really makes an impact but some things that are, that we all relate to, it seems could be strange. I don’t blame bad grades on Tumbr. That would be pretty stupid of me. I admit that I am at fault completely. However, what I have noticed is that we are the ‘Tumblr gen’. We write posts about Netflix and Chill, Procrastination, awful grades and drowning/ sleepwalking through every semester. I relate as much as the next person to each of these comments on the nature of the lifestyle of a college student. Where I think the downfall is though that after sharing these and realising that almost every person is in the same boat, there comes this covert sense of false security, which we don’t notice, which silently cradles us in its warmth and leads us unaware in front of our laptops, binging to fill a hunger more in the soul than the stomach, watching a movie 5 hours before deadlines, thinking we all sink together. This ‘groupthink’ or realisation is ridiculous! Just because everyone is doing something doesn’t make it right. But we relate. This one post that has over a thousand likes and comments of agreement makes us feel better. But what happens when you actually see the grades at the end of your semester? Flunking at various degrees, but together. We fall, together. We sink, we teeter on the edge of unemployment, of sitting in our parents homes making sarcastic comments on Tumblr masking them as great philosophical insight and realisations. We write and read and ignore making unsaid, socially (at least in teenagers) accepted norms, like the sleep scatter, because there is no pattern, nothing cyclical about its occurrence anymore. It is a dangerous slippery slope we are on, and I ruined one semester, disappointed my parents to a depressing extent and lost all sense of motivation, to finally realise this one stupid addiction. The addiction of feeling secure in my loserdom. The best advice I recently received was that, “Its only going to get worse from here. Suck it up and get used to it.” Needless to say, it came far too late to make any real difference but it gives me the assurance that I won’t completely screw up my next semester. Its fun to read lighthearted posts and sharing them with friends for a good laugh but we really need to be careful of how intrinsically we let these alter our behaviours. And here I am, flunking 3 subjects out of 5, with 2 exams in the next 3 days for which I am entirely unprepared, writing a blogpost on the dangers of posting ‘the wrong thing’ on social media. We are the ‘Tumblr generation’. We express. Its just what we do.