There are ninety-five million pictures posted everyday on Instagram. Another 350 million on Facebook. Then there’s TikTok and Twitter and SnapChat and Pinterest and on and on and on. Millions and millions of photos are uploaded daily to the web, where they are trapped forever.
For a while, we were improving life expectancy. From twenty-five years for women in the nineteen-hundreds to seventy-five years in two-thousand. We were on the up and up – or so we thought.
Somewhere in the mid twenty-first century, people started dying younger and younger. Not by much, not at first. It dropped to seventy years. Then it was sixty. Then it was forty-five. When it was forty, people started actually taking notice.
“It’s climate change,” some touted.
“It’s all the additives to our food,” others claimed.
“It’s the stress and anxiety brought on by social and civil unrest and expectations,” yet others believed.
Whatever it was, it was taking its toll on humanity. People flocked in droves to social media – some looking for answers, some to pretend everything was fine, some to share their conspiracy theories, some to beg for help or forgiveness. There were endless arguments. There were news stories, and there were just story stories. But most of all, there were pictures. Selfies, group photos, artistic shots, test shots, funny faces, serious faces, pouty faces, duck faces.
Millions and millions of photos.
There was research. And research on the research. And theories that could never be tested or proven. There were lies and stories and theories and nonsense. No one could figure it out.
Well, not no one…
If only we’d listened to the Native Americans. They knew. Their bonds with nature and the spirits lead them to the truth long before everyone else. But no one would listen.
A picture steals a part of your soul.
Turns out, it’s true.
The soul is a tangible commodity. Everyone has one, yes. But they are not universally sized. Some people are good people, some people are not. So some people have more soul with which to work than others. But as tiny a piece as photos take, it adds up. The invention of social media, and its addictive qualities, were not accidental. They were planned. And we fell too easily into the trap.
