「MMXI」

حثالة الأمم

قَالَ صلى الله عليه وسلم: أَحَبُّ الْكَلاَمِ إِلَى اللَّهِ أَرْبَعٌ: (سُبْحَانَ اللَّهِ)، وَ(الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ)، وَ(لاَ إِلَهَ إِلاَّ اللَّهُ)، وَ(اللَّهُ أَكْبَرُ)، لاَ يَضُرُّكَ بِأَيِّهِنَّ بَدَأتَ

Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said: The most beloved words to Allah are four: Subḥānallāh Walḥamdu lillāh. Wa lā ilāha illallāh Wallāhu Akbar.

One of the things that has made me sad among the cultural shift recently is this idea that sincerity and a desire for acknowledgement is somehow bad, actually.

Like these are some of the most basic human needs and behaviors. It's okay to take joy in things. It's okay to send out thousands of little signals saying "hey, I'm here, I see you are too. Do you see me? Look at this funny/cute/amazing/emotional/important thing! Let's talk about it!" That's what humans have been doing for thousands of years.

Social media at it's dawn looked like the ultimate tool for that. Now you didn't even have to be in the same place to share!

And yet somehow at the same time, it became "cool" to be disinterested and disaffected. Getting "too excited" is now "cringe".

At the risk of sounding like an out of touch Old, I miss the 90s I remember from growing up. Radical, extreme, to the limit. We wore band shirts as a way to say "This is something I really like!", we put stickers and patches and decals on everything we owned to say "this is me! Let's find our common interests!"

And yeah most of Tumblr is still kinda like that.