Seun Tegbe: Birthdays, Facebook & Testifiers – The Attention Seeking Syndrome

Birthdays: that day you believe should be about you, but somehow neglect the fact that you’ve always made every other day about you. Quick test – How often do you cut people off or interrupt conversations by saying ‘me too’, ‘I had the same experience’ or ‘just the other day’ when someone is talking to you about them. Think about how many times you changed the topic and made it about you. Someone calls you and you go off on them about how they don’t call to check on you. If your answer is ‘often’ or ‘very often’ then you’re self-centered, narcissistic.

I personally don’t care for birthdays and I even care less for birthday celebrations. This is partly because I just because I was brought up in the Deeper Life church – with the belief that birthday celebrations can easily get out of hand and lead to ‘sin’ or even result in some person’s head being served for dinner (King Herod, his daughter, wife and John the Baptist.)

Don’t get it twisted, that doesn’t mean that I don’t celebrate birthdays with people. If it means a lot to you I will celebrate it with you. I’m smart enough to know that we can’t all be the same and that diversity is a big part of who we are and how we function. I respect people’s ideas and opinions.

The part I don’t like is when people who beg and agitate for respect are the most biased and opinionated. I usually get this ‘you are just forming’ attitude every other year when I repeat how much I don’t care for birthdays. I can’t be forming for 26 years. I even once forgot my own birthday a few years ago when I thought February had 29 days but it turned out it had only 28, and by the time I realized that it was already the 2nd of March, 24 hours after my 1st of March birthday.

Things got out of hand this year when my wife started crying because I said I didn’t want anything for my birthday. White girls huh? She said she wants to do something to celebrate my birthday but I won’t let her. But I guess I was being selfish also for not thinking about her.

I don’t like birthdays because of the attention seeking, self-centered nature of how it’s celebrated and being one of ‘those people’ puts me off. I sorely dislike attention seekers. I like people who live their lives in the background and in peace.

Which brings me to Facebook, the genius platform that gives a face and voice to all. But simply put, there are some voices that aren’t just meant to be heard. Everyone has the right to have a voice; whether that voice should be heard is another question entirely. Should the voice of a young evil Adolf Hitler be heard? I doubt it. Should Donald Trump be dominating the news everyday with his uncensored stupidity, I highly doubt it. But that is the beauty of Facebook. You don’t even have to be Trump to be seen or heard. Some of the posts I hate seeing the most on Facebook are those ‘happy birthday to moi’ posts.

Really? Are you that lonely, miserable and desperate? You should at least wait for people to pretend to care about you when Facebook reminds them that your birthday is today and practically forces them to send you a wish which explains all the lazy HBD LLNPs you see regularly. People don’t even care enough and are too lazy to write the wishes in one complete sentence. If you ever HBD LLNP me, I’m going to smack you the next time I see your lazy face. The part that pisses me off the most are those people that post birthday wishes to other people’s Facebook pages with their own pictures in it.

Really? Is it that bad now, the narcissism has become that chronic? You couldn’t even pretend that your wishes is about the person for whom the wishes are intended? And thanks to Facebook, I can no longer pretend that I didn’t know it was someone’s birthday when that is the first thing Facebook shows me when you log on. ‘Mr. and Miss so and so have their birthdays today, don’t forget to help them celebrate’. Do I look I care? Because If I do care I won’t need Facebook to remind me. And to make it even worse, now I find it difficult remembering dates I had no troubles remembering before Facebook took it upon itself to become my personal reminder. To Facebook, I don’t even know this person you’re asking me to wish happy birthday, they just added me or I added them because I wanted to stalk their pictures or they wanted to stalk mine. Does it sound right to you wishing your stalker ‘happy birthday’?

Still on Facebook and self-centeredness especially on Sundays, what’s the deal with all those pictures of people in their outfits that are colorful enough to make a chameleon jealous and quotes from Bible passages? You make a collage of your pictures before, during and after church and you add a quote ‘Christ in me, the hope of glory’ and other bs of that nature. Are you sure it’s Christ you’re trying to praise or it’s just an excuse to show off your new Ankara dress and fake LV shoes, belt and bag. If you truly want to praise God you shouldn’t add pictures of you staring at the floor looking for the coins you lost a while ago. You all know what I’m talking about, you’re probably guilty of the same thing.

Lastly, I’ll touch on the perpetual testifiers before I lay down my pen to dry. For those of you that come to testify of how you left your pressing iron on for the whole day and your house wasn’t burnt down to ashes when you got back, I have something to say to you, mind yourself.

Do you even know what testimony is? You should be more careful, not go around being stupid and come to church to bore me about your stupidity on Sunday. There are people that had real problems, had real faith, stayed real faithful and got real help and answers from God. Let them testify. What is the point of those ‘go to the back to meet brother so and so before you testify’? Isn’t that supposed to screen out the phonies? To all you phony, attention-seeking testifiers, again I say mind yourself. You better be careful with your testimonies before you tempt the devil into showing you what real affliction means.

Attention seeking, especially when it is excessive, is highly inappropriate and it puts me off, and probably others too which will mean I’m not crazy. But unfortunately there are hundreds of platforms and applications built for such purposes now.

If you’re an active user of more than 3-5 of these social sites and applications you’re an attention seeker and you need help; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, VK, Pinterest, Snapchat, BBM, Flicker, Vine, IMO etc. Essential communication apps like Messenger, Whatsapp and Viber and exempted. You need to find better and more productive ways to maximize your time and talents. The moral of the story is, live your life however you want, but just live it to yourself, I don’t need to know the details of it and you don’t need the approval of strangers to survive either. Hashtags, likes and shares aren’t going to feed you, except you’ve found a way of regularly getting hundreds of thousands of them of course.

Photo Credit: Dreamstime