“My phone crashed!” my friend L said when I asked her what she thought of people sending daily greetings in GIF format.
“I have to spend time deleting them so it won’t happen again,” she added.
This new phenomenon has bothered me for sometime. Why indeed do people send GIFs like a tic daily?!
I enjoy funny memes now and then and I love to get in touch and reconnect with friends, but when they send these ready-made images with words they did not compose every single day—with nary a personal note—I wonder about sincerity.
A one-sentence caring note does not take much time and effort, so why would they do it by rote? It’s like sending a mechanical robot-greeter that has been programmed in advance. Emotions are out of the picture.
I have about a dozen friends who send me these daily. I never quite know how to respond to them—except for a thumbs-up or heart emoji.
Then an idea hit me: send my blog that tackles what is written in their GIF. For instance, “Have hope on everything.” (I have almost 2,000 uploaded grace blogs on a myriad of topics.)
My reply, “Attached is my reflection on your message on hope. What are your own thoughts?”
The next day I get another GIF with no personal note.
This saddens me. I ask myself again, are those daily GIFs sincere notes or simply sent by rote? Have we turned into machines? Why do we let downloadable images speak for us? Why do we even have to send them? Don’t we know that these are a dime a dozen on the Net? Have we lost our soul?
The last question I often ask these last days.
“Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God.” Psalms 42:11 (NKJV)
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