There was no way of knowing. At least not with any certainty.
It might even be an accidental coincidence.
Felicia looked at her computer screen and wondered. She’d finally yielded to the pressure. She hadn’t wanted to and had always said that she saw no reason to do it. And now that she had she still didn’t understand why it was so popular, so ubiquitous.
She’d been so comfortable in her isolation. So insulated from what she considered the indolent narcissism of society. So free from the maddening dogma of the ideologues on both sides of the aisle.
The stupidity, she thought, as she scrolled through the miasma of buffoonery, the unrelenting display of stupidity perpetrated by people who thought that they were presenting a series of interesting phenomena to the world.
“Interesting to whom?” she asked aloud.
Certainly not to her!
This was supposed to be an expedient. A tool, a device.
Would it have the anticipated results? Would it have any results?
No one could answer those questions. Give it time, she was told. Time alone could bring answers.
Could? Or would?
There were no answers to those questions either.
Just ignore whatever you’re not interested in, she was told.
Easy to say if one had the personality to ignore whatever bothered them. She envied people who could, at least in a way. But then she wondered about that ability in others and how it might affect them in other ways, ways of their own devising or ways of perception in a broader spectrum.
Was she becoming philosophical or simply reacting to stimuli?
And now she’d come full circle. The whole thing was a reaction to stimuli.
Her disdain, her abhorrence, her constant struggle to maintain her equilibrium in the face of a society she saw crumbling before her eyes.
Was that all a reaction to stimuli?
And now that she’d finally yielded, given in to the pressure wasn’t she only reacting to stimuli?
She tried to rationalize it, but had no answer to that question either.
She’d opened a Facebook account and now witnessed her own reflection.