In my final year of medical school, I suffered a paraheartbreak.
This is a new word I have made up because it is supposed to mimic a heartbreak, but it isn’t a real one. In the same way, paramedics are medics but not really medics, or paralegals who are somehow lawyers but not really lawyers.
I thought my girl had left me.
The world was slowly resuming to the new normal after COVID-19. We had been chatting like infatuated lovebirds throughout our mini-holiday break late into the night or early morning, however, you wish to describe it.
Unlike Rihanna’s verse, we didn’t find love at a hopeless place; we found it at a hopeless time. The world was bleak. People were dying. But we thrived. Online, mostly.
As soon as we resumed physical classes, she started ghosting me. My texts would go without replies. My calls would be ignored, and after trying a second time, it would switch to the busy mode.
I was falling apart. I’m not one to easily crumble, but as J. Cole sang:
But, man, I can’t help it, dawg, her mind got me whipped
According to my friends, I deserved whips. How could I simp to that level? I didn’t care. I still believed it could grow into something special. On the brink of losing all hope, I reached out to my closest friends.
Where does she stay?
I answered.
And you still think she’s not giving you the cold shoulder? Are you dumb?
Others were more supportive, saying that I would find someone better.
I didn’t want to believe any of them. Then J. Cole dropped his album, The Off-Season, she called back.
Amid all doubt, I fought for what I believed in, even if it meant looking stupid. How many stupid people like me can you count in your close circle?
That number, if it’s a positive integer, should be reducing towards the non-negative integer, zero, because of the creeping effects of doubt and the dwindling trust at this time in human history.
The contribution of social media and AI
You so out of touch that the world mistreats you
— J. Cole
I have never been grateful to my mother as I am now for not getting me a mobile phone early.
My first one was a flip phone, LG, pink. I got it after high school. I didn’t know what else to do with it than listen to music.
I have known about Facebook since its early days, have watched IG transform from one icon to another, and remember the heydays of Twitter.
But I was hardly active on these platforms. Looking back, it seemed like I had dodged a bullet.
These virtual spaces hardly share meaningful content. Virality is easily achieved if the post is covert, meant to be secretive, dirty, gossip, or a leak. This list may be peppered with occasionally funny videos or a new angle to what everyone has been streaming. For instance, a trailer of Tom Cruise’s Final Reckoning.
If I had been a hooked social media user, I could have already broken ties with my lady a long time ago. I would have doubted her explanations, I would not have given it another shot, and I would have sided with my friends.
Social media has a way of fostering seeds of doubt for the most meaningful feats that we celebrate.
waxes lyrical about this in a post that almost brought tears to my face. has also written something similar, how the most rapidly depleting resource in our online space is trust. We no longer trust any advert popping up on our screens. We don’t trust the intentions of those predatory emails when they land in our inboxes. Heck, we don’t trust that they mean us well when the email reads: I hope this email finds you well. We don’t trust the word ‘kindly’ anymore, as it has been transformed into a passive-aggressive sign-off. We don’t trust mysterious messages in our DMs. We don’t trust that our uncles will share our CVs with someone they know in a company to help secure a position for us. We don’t trust that the various HR teams will bother looking at our resumes. Heck, we even know they don’t trust these resumes, so they have automated the application system. After you somehow qualify, they don’t trust the preceding automated step that shortlisted you and now want to know who you are. And after the interview, we don’t trust that they will get back to us with their decision.We don’t trust that influencers are genuinely interested in their audiences. We don’t trust some of the sad impressions they post. We don’t trust that they have the best lives because others have confessed to the opposite. We don’t trust that any relationship is as pristine as the ones from Ladybug folk tales; nothing will ever fall into a happily ever after story.
We don’t trust our friends when we lend them money. We don’t trust that they have good intentions with our other friends of the opposite sex. We don’t trust that they will keep time if we agree to meet at a certain time. We don’t trust the excuses they give when they arrive late.
Let me control myself.
The more trust dwindles, doubt grows.
Doubt is what J. Cole sings about when he sang:
I think I’m losing my balance
Without a foundation to defend, you hang in the balance, but not balancing at all. With nothing to defend, nothing to stand up for, or nothing to reach out to, what’s the point of it all?
I was particularly shaken when Freya mentioned how the very pinnacles that we praise are the ones we shun the young from pursuing. Marriage, for instance, is built on trust. It’s the faith that nothing can break the bond. The longer the bond lasts, the more admirable it is.
Yet, the young are shunned from jumping right into it. These are seeds of doubt sown so early as to sprout and destabilize the faith system in them. Seeds of doubt.
When something sounds a little off, you begin to question if you made the right choice. Seeds of doubt.
When someone questions your ideas online, you begin to wonder if you know your stuff. Seeds of doubt.
Social media is a new infrastructure that can propel shame and, as a result, fuel doubt. When a power couple announces its divorce, the news travels like COVID. Everyone knows about it, and the comments are all similar:
I knew it.
No one is faithful anymore.
The good men are gone.
Women empowerment.
Better be alone than broken
To live a peaceful life, set no expectations.
It’s sad because I imagine how the very infrastructure that participates in this catalysis would not have risen to global dominance without faith.
Facebook was a simple messaging platform. Meta may not be the best example to use, but for it to grow to the behemoth it currently is, the founders needed faith during their downtimes. None of the biggest entities you can think of could have survived if doubt were all they knew.
Faith gives you something to fight for. Even religion, as much as I have my issues with it, is respectable because of the faith they cling to. Science does not progress unless the pioneer believes in their ideas. It demands faith.
Showering the world with doubt and depleting it of trust is sucking away its life force. Social media was meant to bring people together, but its human residents now feel more alone than ever. Losing their balance.
Wars were won through faith. When the Spartans marched with 300 men, they held faith that their leader would see them through. Faith gives you something to fight for. Faith saw the world through the worst global pandemic. Faith is what Ethan Hunt’s team had when he fought to prevent The Entity from destroying the world.
Doubt does the opposite. What’s worse, AI continues to expedite doubt.
Every time you check your work with AI, it continues to reduce your confidence in yourself. A catch-phrase for a poster, a cold or application email, or a catchy landing page, written by AI, erodes your trust in yourself. In turn, it makes you doubt what you make in its absence.
Writing, which is a discovery process, changes if nobody is willing to trust that they will get to the end. Anyone who writes, not through prompting an AI, but writing by springboarding words from their brain to a blank sheet or document, believes they will get to the other side, to the end.
It’s like swimming without knowing where the shore lies. Even then, it might not be a shore, but a stepping stone, or an island for temporary respite before making the dive once again. It takes faith.
True, doubt is helpful at times. Without doubt, anyone can whip up a story to sway people into harm or deception. Propaganda has worked in the past and will continue to work because of the ‘gullible’. Since nobody wants such a label, they’d rather stick with doubt.
But doubt is not sticky.
The flip side of this story is that these two are resources. Something that dwindles means it can grow. Trust and faith can grow.
Social media makes it appear obvious that once trust is broken, it’s over. But trust was built. A crack on a wall is hardly visible if the wall is that of a skyscraper. Trust and faith can be built, but not with doubt, with faith.
Faith requires taste. Taste is deeply personal. I’d rather have a lengthy conversation with someone who believes the Earth is flat than anyone who presents first-order reports from an AI response about the shape of our planet. Flat Earthers have taste (despite my opposed position).
Taste cannot be developed if everyone spends most of their time consuming. Taste is built by creating. Creating takes time. Time demands breaks. Breaks require faith. Faith brings you back to pick up where you left off.
Doubt does little. It’s selfish. It doesn’t let anything stick around besides itself.
Paradoxically, meaningful doubt also requires faith. If you’re to argue against a hypothesis or theory, the burden of proof lies with someone who believes they can bury the theory. Burdens cannot be carried without intent, without faith.
Scientists need faith. It’s called the irrational faith in rationality. Organisms became multicellular because of faith. Communities formed because of faith. Eusocial superorganisms trust their caste systems because of faith.
Meaningless doubt scatters. It scatters thoughts, ideas, and people. And in the end, we don’t have a sturdy generation, but one that has no balance.
What I’m trying to say is…
Sensu J. Cole:
Just get a grip
Grip, tenacity, is the substance of belief. Belief in your ability, in your chance to get up again when you fall, and in the chance to progress despite life’s punches.
Without another leg to rest the body’s weight, you can trust that your grip on a crutch will still keep you steadier than without it. It can move you from point A to point B.
Quicksand can swallow people whole, but when you hold onto solid ground or grip tightly onto a branch, you can pull or get pulled out. It requires faith.
Now more than ever, we need to nurture our belief in our abilities.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube