Ghosting Your Help!

Don't Ghost Your Help - Most Bridges Shouldn't Burn


Wikipedia says, "Ghosting is the practice of ending all communication and contact with another person without any apparent warning or justification and subsequently ignoring any attempts to reach out or communication made by said person." (27/05/2022@20H10). Ghosting is simply rendering someone non-existent. Not to be naive, there are instances where ghosting is warranted, most especially when there's no mutual trust, mutual respect, or win-win relations. So it requires some cost-benefit calculations. 


Maybe I'm insufferable and obnoxious. I still don't think so. But in this post, I discuss my observations around how a technology such as social media designed to bring us closer (mainly for ideas/information sharing) appears to be creating many Saharas between people (siblings, friends, acquaintances, etc.), resulting in almost zero opportunities (6/10 unemployed youth). With a mobile device on your palm 96 times a day on average, how come there is such low interaction between people? There are probably more than 300 people (contacts) at your fingertips. Another one is how do people with depression (mainly caused by unemployment) fail to speak out or seek help given this context? Something is deeply displaced here. Technology seems to be progressing faster than human evolution or, in simple terms, human brain development. Even though there's interconnectedness brought forth by social media, we still have tribal brains that are refusing to expand. To avert ghosting, I usually make sure I'm the last to text or use an emoji 👍,🙏,🙌, or 💪. It is better than blue ticks or cold silence. Can we bring some humility back to the table, given our challenges as a society? Is Ubuntu just part of sloganeering?


Don't burn any bridges, no matter how small or narrow. The unemployment rate in South Africa is way too high to be ghosting people who may come across opportunities that are a perfect fit for your skills, charisma, wit, etc. Hence, I say, "Don't ghost your help." To paraphrase Kendrick, more significantly, make sure you don't burn your brother's/sister's/cousin's bridges, remember that his/her/their accomplishments will make way for your offspring. In short, keep your relationships alive and communication channels open. 


George Gilder said, "Capitalism is an information and learning system governed by information as entrepreneurial surprise." Thus, it functions very well when information is freely exchanged between economic agents like yourself and your friends, family, etc. There need to be a free flow of ideas (good and bad). This free flow must cross-cultural, religious, racial, ethnic, academic, discipline, and other boundaries. If you are not getting opportunities, you have isolated yourself (Probably by ghosting or blue-ticking) and are not in the information loop. Isolation can only lead to poverty and backwardness. Another possibility, given my experience of black culture, is that you are in a corrosive loop. From information theory, we seek to improve something called the signal-to-noise ratio. In the case of black culture, there's just too much noise, that is, channel clutter, jitter and yes! Ghosting (because people tend to think they are better than you, the typical highly materialist view of the world).


In summary, don't burn bridges. Don't ghost your help. Let information freely flow through and by you like water molecules (H2O). Stay in the positive energy information loop.

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