I would like to think that many, perhaps even most, of us are doing the best we can to be good people. What constitutes a “good person” will vary, of course, but in a general sense it involves some level of kindness, generosity and consciousness. One thing I know for sure about being a good person, though, is that it is not a competition.
In the sometimes magnified world of social media, however, practices like call-outs and pile-ons seem to suggest that other people feel otherwise.
We all spend an inordinate amount of time socialising online. Far more than we do in the physical world, that’s for sure. I know a lot of people worry that this is a bad thing but I’m not one of them. As a person who likes to have discussions and see what other people are thinking about or doing, but isn’t always so keen on intense mingling with a large number of people, social media is a blessing. It has actually been an excellent way to filter people, for me anyway.
Facebook, in particular, has been a godsend in helping me sort out who I actually want in my life. Some people seem nice enough at social things, when you first meet them. But friending them on facey shows a whole other side to the mild-mannered guy you had a beer with at your friend’s barbecue. You might have spoken about a mutual love of Game of Thrones, but you didn’t ask his opinion on refugees, marriage equality and climate change, if you know what I mean. 
Thanks to Facebook, I’ve been able to identify, fairly quickly, who my kinda people are. I realised a while ago now that life isn’t like school, where you have to be friends with everybody. If someone is a jerk, you can just not be friends with them. Don’t waste your awesomeness on people that don’t deserve you. That’s my motto, anyway. You can just quietly click unfriend or unfollow. Unjerk your social media feeds, if you will.
David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe is set to arrive in Australia, so now is as good a time as any to join the”Don’t Cry Wolfe” movement. I first read about this at the start of 2016; a year on, I think we should all take the pledge. It’s really simple; stop sharing things on Facebook from the page of David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe.
Most of us tend to surround ourselves with people that are similar to us in certain ways. We drift towards people with similar morals and personal ethics. When we discuss things like politics or current events, we are often discussing them with people who feel similarly to us.
So when things happen that going against what we believe, it comes as a bit of a shock to the system to know that many people feel the opposite. I know a fair few Queenslanders would have felt this way seeing Pauline Hanson winning seats in the senate. Did people actually vote for the woman who makes no secret of her intolerance for Muslims, who is pandering to so-called men’s rights groups and who is publicly stating that vaccines are linked to autism, a claim that has been disproved hundreds of times? They sure did.