Self-destruction by Snapchat

There was a time when I sat in my dimly lit room with nothing but the dust lining the corners of the walls to offer companionship. My heart craved human warmth, but my perpetual inactivity had caused severe atrophy in my legs, to the point where it took too much effort to move. In this dark puddle of lethargy, I discovered Snapchat. Using Snapchat, I could interact with my friends without leaving the comfort of my room. Snapchat has different timer settings and drawing options that span every color of the rainbow, and I quickly realized that I could reinvent myself and become whoever I wanted to be.

Imagine coming back from the gym after working out for the first time in weeks. Your normally composed hair is disheveled and slick with sweat, and you feel pretty invincible. Never mind that you dangled on that pull-up bar for five minutes before you realized that you couldn’t actually do a pull-up. Never mind that you ran on the treadmill for less than 20 seconds before cramping up. You didn’t snapchat that. Fortunately, you did snapchat an opportune, albeit irrelevant selfie to all of your friends with the note, “Hey! I’m all sweaty because I just worked out!”

Now the entire Snapchat community (read: your six friends) can bear witness to your contrived athleticism. Feel the need to prove how jacked you are? Take off your shirt and add chiseled abs with the drawing option. Or draw chiseled abs on top of your shirt. Heck, I subtly draw abs on myself every time I snapchat, regardless of context. I like to think of myself as a psychologist, except instead of actually helping people with their problems, I’m discreetly using positive reinforcement to increase my sex appeal. This works best with a succession of one-second Snapchats that alternate between pictures of me and phallic imagery. I have not put this method into action yet, but in my mind it goes something like this: “I don’t know why Aoi keeps sending me pictures of bananas, but boy, would I sure like me some wild and carnal sex with him.”

Let me present another classic scenario that I assume everyone else also struggles with. You have classes with your friends all morning, but then you don’t see them again until your afternoon lecture. Most people use this time to take a nap, do their laundry or look at themselves in the mirror (I know I’m mostly guilty of the latter), but as an elite Snapchat socialite, you make the most of technology to help fill in that three-hour social black hole. I know I’ve brightened my friends’ days with hilarious pictures of me making duck-faces. We have fun.

And the magic continues in the bedroom. People say things like, “Snapchat is so sketch,” or “It’s made for sexting,” but those people don’t recognize how Snapchat has revolutionized the traditional dick pic. While before penises brazenly assaulted the eyes of our youth (“How was I supposed to know what ‘the tree of life’ would turn up on Google without safe-search, Ms. Fernandez?”), Snapchat has restored a refreshing and aesthetic quality to those penises. With the right angle, lighting and timing, Snapchat can transform an image that might under normal circumstances be horrifying and disgusting into something subtle and artistic. I, for one, tastefully time my pictures to disappear before the recipient has the time to collapse and go into cardiac arrest out of sheer revulsion. However, even one-second dick pics are rarely warranted and often traumatic. Luckily, the cutting-edge technology of the app also makes it possible to adorably litter the aforementioned picture with so many smiley faces that it becomes impossible to see what the original picture was. Another convenient alternative is taking your dick pics with the lights turned off. Snapchatting in the dark allows you to crawl even further into the black hole of human isolation.

Oh, Snapchat. I would choose you over normal, healthy social interaction any day.