New Year’s Resolution for Arab Millennials: Stop Your Narcissism

We’re torn. Torn between the life we live and maintaining a balance of not losing ourselves. There’s a part of our lives that is semi or for some extremely narcissistic, superficial, and shallow. It ranges from posting snapchats of food, to seductive Instagram selfies. Our status about our so-called haters and our opinions on any form of pop culture and current events. Admittedly, it’s pretty stupid, but it’s our lives and in the world we live in, oversharing is not only the norm, it’s actually encouraged.

Oddly enough for those of Arab decent, we would expect a bit more humility. While it’s not completely lost, it’s not necessarily prioritized very well in our daily lives. Sharing the story of an orphan refugee, attending a fundraiser for a nonprofit, retweeting the thoughts of our fellow intellects is all great, phenomenal actually, but why are we cutting our efforts short?

Many Arab millennials have fallen into the cycle of slacktivism, sharing news, stories, and efforts of others, but not actually doing anything effective to change the harsh realities at hand.

The amount of time millennials spend thinking about themselves will most likely never amount to the time they could’ve spent making someone’s life better. We can’t stop the war in Syria, we don’t have the resources to end the bloodshed in Iraq, we can’t make Israeli forces stop committing war crimes. But we can dedicate our time, the smallest amount of money, and our position of power -as people living comfortably- to help make a difference in our life time.

We can stop being so narcissistic. We can stop gloating about the abundance of materials we posses, we can help elevate those trying to do the simplest of human things, like finding a job to feed their family or not die of a curable illness.

This is not a plea to stop sharing your happy moments on social media, but a recommendation that we, as a generation, should make more of an effort to actually care and actively do something about our so called concern.

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