The Selfie Quandary

Shopping carts accidentally hit one another; people are busy-bees peering at their grocery lists, randomly searching the rows they should head to. Machines at the counters click and do their brainy calculations. The man at the baker’s corner is busy expertly wrapping loaves of bread. Somewhere around the corner, the smell of roasted coffee tempts your senses. Let’s take a minute here.

You may be wondering why you’re being taken on grocery shopping when you already did yours last Thursday. Before any further explanations, let’s zoom in a little first.

In the corner of the chocolate fridge is a young lady making a duck face, pretty confidently, and taking a selfie with Swiss chocolates in the background. Is it just me or does it really look weird?

While taking selfies is not absurd by any definition, the place where you take these front-facing portraits really matters. Some social sites have encouraged people to post their pictures around the clock, but that does not mean that you go to a local grocery store and start taking selfies while everyone else is bustling around quickly, shoving things in their baskets and cutting down their grocery lists; that one girl taking absurd pictures really looks out of place. Why in the world someone would want to know about your grocery trip just down the lane is beyond me. Also, what’s the sense of pouting here?

You may agree or you might not agree with me here, but you may be convinced if I narrate a few horrible, unbelievable incidents where folks have wanted to take selfies that turned out to be killfies. In the foolish desire to snap the most rip-roaring, out-of-this-world selfies, many youngsters have lost their lives.

The number of killfies, or selfie=related deaths, have recently been shooting to the stars. A new report that was published in November 2016 has stated that 127 people died while trying to strike a killer pose between the 29-month span from March 2014 to September 2016. In the first 8 months of 2016, killfies snuffed the lives of 73 people, up from 39 people in 2015 and 15 people in 2014.

*Some of the following links may contain graphic images*

The Google search regarding this saga of selfie deaths dates back to Janiary 2014 when a young Lebanese lad, Mohammad Chaar, lost his life in a car bomb, minutes after posting a selfie taken in Beirut.

In January 2015, a pair of Russian soldiers combined a selfie with a live grenade. Tragically, the grenade detonated, killing the soldiers.

Similarly, in August 2015, another selfie crawled its way to the jinxed list of killfies. 32-year-old David Lopez decided to take a selfie at the annual running of the bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain. The picture framed him sprinting through the streets with two bulls chasing him. Alas, a third one crushed his life from behind him.

But the unluckiest amidst the crowd of countries is India, where the number of these mishaps is reportedly highest. One of the deadliest incidents took place in India in January 2015 when a trio of college boys tried snapping a selfie next to a moving train but were killed instead.

While the list of terrible incidents can go on and on, the real question is: What is the real thrill behind taking these killer photos? Not only can selfies be pathetic at times (in my personal opinion), but they can be dangerous as well. It is not something to laugh off or feel sympathetic about; it’s high time that we all correct ourselves and our youth’s mistakes if and when we see them. It is time that we make use of the common sense that God has gifted us with.

Leave a Reply