Essay: You Are Just An Asshole and/or Internet Genius

It is annoying when I send someone an email with relative urgency and then they don’t get back to me for hours but the whole time I am waiting I am casually watching them ‘social network’ on various platforms meaning that I am effectively being ignored. 

In those situations I feel that they are 80% likely to know that they have received aforementioned email from me (if smartphone is being used). Usually these emails do not require a complicated response (a date/time/yes/no). So the fact that they read it, and then return to actively and publicly ‘social networking’ to me means that they are essentially saying that I am of low priority.

A couple of times I have had to restrain myself from going ahead and calling them out on it (via social media platform they’re using while ignoring my email). But I never actually did, would probably come off as an asshole or something. Also feel like if they wanted to, they could just give me a lame excuse which would be impossible to refute unless I did a stalkerish amount of investigating. Then even if I were to prove my point, I would still be the asshole who has nothing better to do than devote large chunks of time to social network-sleuthing, which no one thinks is something to ‘take seriously’. 

I would probably lose my friends and that would probably be okay. At least at this particular moment, mostly because I have been thinking about my friends and our relationship dynamic a lot recently. I’m beginning to think I don’t actually like my friends. This mostly stems from the way I feel treated by them in certain situations. I often feel like they lash out at me on various social media platforms in order to ‘prove that they are cool’ or are ‘putting me in my place’. I don’t understand why they think it’s necessary to do this. Feel like they like to ‘show off’.

Sometimes I am an asshole in my brain and think things like ‘they are just jealous’ or ‘I am just smarter than them’. I don’t say these things out loud, the evidence would then be overwhelmingly in their favor that I am the asshole. The secret to life seems to be carefully regulating how often/much one comes of as an asshole. Everything in moderation.

They often get surly when they think they have ‘discovered something on the internet’ (which doesn’t actually exist) and then they want to share it with me but I have already seen it, sometimes months ago. Then I say ‘oh I have seen that before/months ago’ and they get all weird and then I say something sarcastic like ‘that’s 23 million internet years old’ and then they say something in a mocking tone like ‘oh, look who is mr. internet genius!’ and I try to say stuff like ‘I just spend a lot of time on the internet’ but they just keep making asshole faces and saying stuff that is ‘putting me in my place’ but is actually ‘hurting my feelings.’

I have some friends who have never hurt my feelings. I wish I could see them more often but most of them live scattered about in various places/countries. If I were to say the previous two sentences out loud to a new person in front of my friends, they would butt in with some asshole thing to say like ‘oh, did you know that he went to ______?’ in a sarcastic asshole tone that makes me want to leave the party and/or die.

My friends say I am ‘just a baby’. I’m pretty convinced that they’re just ‘a bunch of assholes’.