If we take a look at our Facebook, it seems that every day a new trend with #tag appears. Although, when we stop to read, the only thing new is the name we have given it in English. The king out, almost a reinvention of petting, is to get involved with the clothes on all the life and the sex diet, the diet of the cornet that we all know. Well, something similar happens with the new buzzword, ghosting.
The word, logically, comes from ‘ghost’. I don’t know if anyone else used the term before, but among my friends and me, it was very common when a guy stopped calling, or didn’t respond to a message for days, to say that he had made you a Casper. What has to be from the generation of the 80s and the influence that cinema has had on our lives. Come on, that of playing the ghost and disappearing without giving further explanations and without knowing what the reason was, is something that has happened a lifetime.
Of course, the difference is that now the word has a more technological nuance. Because they no longer stop calling you, they directly block you on the networks. That is, they remove you as a friend on Facebook or they pass you to the restricted access group, or they directly block you in Whattsapp. Something that you realize when that person never receives your messages again (they never have double checks) and you assume that that person has not moved to live in the subway tunnels, but has deleted you.
Although disappearing without giving explanations was something that already happened, the truth is that it was not as simple as now. Because you used to know something about yourself and you ran the risk of finding yourself again and having to explain yourself. Now, however, it is most likely that we have met through a network of contacts and that, with a bit of luck, deleting your profile solves not having to see you again in life. Although life, sometimes, is a handkerchief and can give us more than one surprise.
Therefore, it seems that ghosting has become a much more common practice. According to some surveys, about 80 percent of millennials say they have ever been ghosted. You might think that the explanation is that, in the nets, young people are only looking for easy sex and that they simply release the fish after catching it. But no, it seems that this is not logical, since these same studies say that most connect to these networks in search of a serious relationship.
The point is that thanks to the networks we have the feeling that there is much more to choose from, and that while we find or not someone to make us settle down, we can mercilessly discard along the way. After all, every day we depersonalize relationships more. We go to an app, we acquire a series of profiles, we try them on and if they don’t suit us, we just leave them in the store. As if those avatars were only virtual and behind them there were no people. As if it really took us so long to say that we just weren’t interested.
The networks of contacts have allowed us to meet many more people and it is obvious that not all the conversations that start, or even all the appointments that one have, will become a relationship, be it sexual, sentimental or even friendship. If we enter the game of the virtual, we should all accept that one of the rules is that you have to know how to withdraw and accept that the other person, for whatever reason, does not want to continue in contact with us. What should never be lost is courtesy, respect and, ultimately, empathy with the other. That law that can be applied to almost everything from ” do not do what you would not like to be done.