The Real Faces Behind "I'm Fine"

The social media is doing a whole lot to us these days, and not a number of us is in the know. How many times have you typed "I'm fine" with shaky fingertips and blood shot eyes? Well, only a smilling you was seen in the profile picture. Those times you were ripped up and teared down, the cold days you felt you could not just move on. The dark times someone who meant the world to you walked away and left in your heart a gaping hole, and the dark hours you felt you've failed so many times and wanted the end of your very life.

Then someone typed 'Hi' and you replied 'Hello.' 'How are you?' He/She continued, and you couldn't help but reply the normal way: "I'm fine". You didn't even know if you were telling a lie or just following the informal rules of online pleasantries. Well, sometimes life presents us ironies. How can you explain greeting someone 'good morning' when you've just been diagnosed with cancer? What the hell is good about the morning? You still have to greet "good afternoon" when you know too well that it's not true, and 'good night,' when you, sure, will lie on an empty stomach.

It is always like that in the latest world, and it's so painful we all have to deceive ourselves once in a while. But, life was far more interesting in the days of our fathers, when kinsmen could look into one another's eyes and see the truth. They could hear beyond words and ask questions, even when the eyes fought the lips. But here we are today, behind our phones faking it. We cry much and our profile pictures laugh so hard: everyone assumes the other is happy and feels sad much more for being the odd one out.

Someone tells you "I'm fine" now and the next minute he commits suicide; or dies of congested heart attack tomorrow. It's just a new world we found ourselves, where real connection is gone and brothers only communicate behind the screen; no one sees another's eyes to decode what the truth is. The truth is that many of the faces behind the phone, telling you "I'm fine" are actually frowned, grimaced, gloomy, sullen, dejected, and as long as a fiddle.

Ours is a cold modern world, a world of loneliness, its resultant deaths, and funerals and requiem. We've lost one thing too much to civilisation: the old-fashioned kinship bonds, and for that, we are paying with our lives. In the heart of an ordinary night come-play-with-me, africans used to connect in the real sense of it, and outside the distractions of the social media, share problems, and once a problem is shared, it is half solved. Hence, there were less worries; and as such, near zero heart problems that kill us in dozens today.

Our foregoers would sit in groups with families, friends and neighbours in the night; and we think illiteracy was only taking its tolls on them. Little do we know, that "when we gather together in the moonlit village ground, it is not because of the moon. Everyman can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so."

We are too western to bond today, in the ordinary way. We are a bit too enlightened to spend time with the neighbours who can proffer solutions to our challenges, we wake up to embrace our smart phones, we say good morning to Whatsapp, and sleep with Facebook in our hearts; our worries compound. Our free times, we spend online, faking smiles behind the screen and telling those who can't see our weepy faces "I'm fine," while the world around us crumbles, and not a single thing is fine with us.

How are you? I hope you are really fine today.

Ayeni Faith Damilola
faithdamilolaayeni@yahoo.com

That's the reality of the world we live in. Not sure it's going to change anytime soon if at all it changes.