Is "awesome" really that awesome?

If we do a small buzz analysis on the most used English words on Facebook (at least in my friends’ network), I’m quite confident that the words such as ‘awesome’, ’greatest’, ’best’, ’excellent’ or any other superlative adjective would top the list.

I’m curious. Why a seemingly ordinary experience of having a tea is excellent? Why would a bike ride be the greatest experience of a person (unless he had the women of his life at the pillion during the ride and a lot of speed bumps)? Why would a mere coincidence of running into your friends in a movie theater is awesome? Some experiences will indeed be awesome, but could everything be?

Looks like, ever since facebook entered our lives, that everything seems ‘great’ and life isn’t dull anymore. I don’t think that was Facebook’s agenda at all. People might have had the same experiences before they were bitten by ‘status messages’ and nobody went about calling people how their experience turned out to be.

I’m confused. What is the motif behind proclaiming everything as being fantastic? Have people really started appreciating the small wonders or little incidents of their lives? Or they just amplify their normal experiences? In either case, does the word “awesome” really qualify as a valid adjective for every tiny little thing? Wouldn’t an experience fall into the category of “good”, “nice” or “OK” at all?

Self-concept is what you view yourself to be and the ideal self-concept is what you want to be. May be people try to bridge the gap by convincing oneself that their experienced was just pure brilliance? Isn’t this slightly delusional?

I believe that peer pressure creeps in too. A person may feel that others seem to have an exciting life and he/she assumes that their life is perceived to be dull by others. May be it is dull. May be everyone’s life is dull. But do you really want to just put a mask over and convince yourself that whatever you did was quite extra-ordinary? If you thought hanging out with your friends was awesome, then you may have some social issues.

Or is it like being kids again? Kids constantly do things to get the attention of their parents and then later their approval of the same. They stop doing the same things if their parents don’t care about the actions. This is true for grownups too, but not as significant as in children. Are we being kids here trying to gain feedback of the act that we performed? It would be interesting to see if we constantly ignore a person’s status message (by not ‘liking’ it or not ‘commenting’ on it), would that continue to keep such awesome status messages? May be not.

Nowadays, I have to dig deeper and harder to find out good content that my friends are sharing. And hardly, any new content is being generated. I’m frequently faced with tough decisions on whether to hide a friend or not. Not that I’ve been perfect. I succumbed to this superlative world as well.

Since my last post that compiled my frustrations with Facebook, I’ve actually learned it to use it to my needs. I’ve tried controlling the spam and have met with decent success. But there is only so much I can control. I can’t hide people’s status messages. I can hide only people as a whole :(

We will run out of superlatives pretty soon. And then we would start seeing our own derivations such as ‘awesomest’, ‘bestest’, ’excellentest’ etc. Not awesome at all!