Attention: we have a bug. This blog is dedicated to Brazilian audiences, and the title begins with the word “love” — or, technically, “I love”, conjugated with the first person singular. But it has nothing to do with that, and I swear I’ll do my best to balance the scale on that perspective to a fair amount. That’s how you balance scales, isn’t it? Well, sometimes, you just put in the weight and the balance shows how much is there. Words matter. Acronyms, and an updatedness of their scientific study, also do.

The abbreviation stands for “add me on Snapchat”. It was popularized amongst teenagers with nothing to fear, girls who wanted to be popular and lonely souls in search for an ever-lasting connection that they didn’t know would end up traumatizing them for the rest of their teenage life. But that’s because you’re only a teen when you’re from 13 to 17, and your legal age is a hell of a party.

Let’s give people what they want, shall we? Who’s bringing the sausage? We love barbecue in Brazil. More than Snapchat. And no, we don’t post photos of the barbecue on Snap; we have historically chosen Instagram. Did I say historically? Oh man, what a joke. I could do stand up. Laying down on my bed, of course. What I’m referring to is the exchange of intimate photos an images on the app. I gotta say: it’s not a trend at all. Things are heavily monitored, way more than you think. And way more than anyone would like to think, which brings us to the main discussion.

Everyone wants to make new connections in life. According to an article from 2011 published on Scientific American, the human brain is able to make 100 trillion connections. But ask anyone how many people are in their close friends circle, and they’ll variate from asking you if you mean “close friends” on Instagram or “real close friends”. The numbers might be counted on one hand. Scott Galloway, professor at New York University, has hinted on public appearances that Gen Z is trusting less people than the previous generation, and even showed a graph that shows that, in 2021, 12% of Americans have reported having nearly zero close friends, and 32% have less than three. Not so many connections now, are there?

The exercise, if we are to analyze living with technology outside of the corporate world (which is not Scott’s expertise, sorry pal), is to learn how to maintain relationships so we can, for the love of God, have more than 3 close friends. And more friends in general: if the question had been “how many contacts do you have on Snapchat?” (which yours truly has tried asking and suffered with the backlash alone, because how dare you), they’re report thousands, in a fat percentage. According to me. According to agencies, 750 million people use the app daily, so you do the math. Really, I’m not good with numbers, just random assumptions and shitty analyses. But some people have said the maximum is 5000.

As you can probably tell, talking to five thousand people must be a lot of hard work, but someone’s gonna have the brilliant thought of saying “but teacher, my brother has 21 thousand followers on TikTok, he plays soccer”. Nobody asked, buddy. But okay. Does the guy talk to 21 thousand people? No, he doesn’t. He posts, and part of those people will see it and maybe click like. Having a conversation is a different thing; making real bonds, actually trusting, and trusting wholly? This seems almost unreal these days… and that’s what we need to be talking about.

Let’s all keep in mind, though, that the people we follow have actual millions, if not billions, of followers; we also follow companies, and like I said about the fictional soccer player, nobody asked us to. Isn’t it time we review this whole thing, or are we supposed to ignore the factors that lead to good health and well-being in our lives, which we accept as partly digital, and live a sustainable lifestyle with positivity and improvement as motors of our actions? Do we count on the networks to provide the eventfulness, for lack of a better term, of negative engagement, or do we change the game and spread more kindness, empathy (which is such a broad thing) and open-mindedness? We need to respect our own limits, but not come to a point of prohibiting interactions with a click because nobody’s worth it. Everyone has something to give. And the tech companies… they take up a lot of our time.