WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER ENEMY — WE HAVE WI-FI
I woke up this morning thinking about something that’s become almost impossible to ignore when you spend any amount of time watching what’s happening on social media. Black people are arguing with complete strangers on the internet, and somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that this constant fighting represents community. We don’t need another enemy because, apparently, we have Wi-Fi. Give somebody a smartphone, a comment section, a controversial video and a little free time, and suddenly people who have never met each other are preparing for emotional warfare as though they’re sitting across the kitchen table from one another. Somebody can post a thirty-second video, and before you know it, the comments have turned into a battlefield over Black men, Black women, relationships, money, politics, age, masculinity, femininity, success, failure and everything else that can possibly divide people.
What makes this even more interesting is how quickly an individual person’s behavior gets turned into a statement about millions of people. One person does something foolish, and suddenly it becomes, “Black men are this,” or “Black women are that,” or “young people are destroying everything,” or “older people don’t understand anything.” A single person becomes a representative for an entire group, and now everybody is expected to defend or attack a category of people because of what one individual did on a screen. Before long, people aren’t even talking about the original situation anymore. They’re arguing about identity, pride, gender and who supposedly represents the entire Black community.
I’m watching all of this and asking a very simple question: when did this become community? Because community isn’t supposed to leave you emotionally exhausted every time you open your phone. Community isn’t supposed to make you hate people you’ve never met. Community isn’t supposed to convince you that every disagreement is an attack and every different opinion is evidence that somebody is your enemy. Something has gone terribly wrong when people can spend hours arguing with strangers online and walk away believing they’ve done something productive for the culture.
I’m not saying that disagreement is bad. Disagreement is necessary. Different opinions are necessary. Debate is necessary. People should be able to challenge one another and speak their minds. The problem starts when disagreement becomes disrespect, when conversation becomes combat, and when people become more interested in humiliating somebody than understanding what they’re actually saying. That’s when social media stops being a tool for communication and starts becoming a machine for emotional warfare.
And that’s what I want to talk about, because this isn’t simply about social media. It’s about psychology. It’s about validation. It’s about loneliness. It’s about identity. It’s about generations. It’s about Black community. Most importantly, it’s about what happens to us when we allow strangers on a screen to have more influence over our emotions than the people who actually know us, love us and live around us.
WE HAVE GIVEN STRANGERS TOO MUCH AUTHORITY OVER OUR EMOTIONS
Think about how strange this really is. Somebody you’ve never met can type a sentence underneath your comment, and suddenly your entire mood changes. You don’t know where this person lives. You don’t know their background. You don’t know what they’ve experienced. You don’t know whether they’re telling the truth. You don’t know whether they’re having a terrible day. You don’t even know whether they’re deliberately trying to provoke you. Yet somehow, a stranger can type, “You’re an idiot,” and now you’re pacing around your house preparing a seventeen-paragraph response.
That’s how much emotional authority we’ve handed to people who have done absolutely nothing to earn it. We’ve allowed people who don’t know us to determine whether we’re angry, offended, embarrassed, frustrated or ready to fight. And the person on the other end may be sitting there laughing because they discovered something about you: they discovered exactly which button to push. Once somebody realizes that they can provoke you into responding, you’ve become part of their entertainment.
That’s something people have to understand about the internet. Not everybody who engages you wants to understand you. Some people want information. Some people want conversation. Some people want to debate honestly. But some people want a reaction. They’re looking for attention, and your anger is the payment. The more upset you become, the more attention they receive. You may think you’re winning the argument because you have the better point, but the other person may have already gotten exactly what they wanted from you.
That’s why emotional discipline has become so important. You don’t have to respond to everything that mentions you. You don’t have to correct everybody. You don’t have to defend yourself against every accusation. You don’t have to prove your intelligence to somebody who has already decided that you’re stupid. Sometimes the most powerful response is no response at all. There are moments when silence isn’t weakness. Silence is wisdom.
WE’VE CONFUSED DISAGREEMENT WITH DISRESPECT
Another problem I see is the way disagreement has become personal. Somebody can have a different opinion about relationships, politics, money, family or culture, and suddenly people act as though their entire identity has been attacked. There’s a difference between saying, “I disagree with you,” and saying, “You’re worthless.” Unfortunately, social media has blurred that line so badly that many people no longer know how to disagree without trying to destroy the other person.
There was a time when two people could have a heated disagreement and still sit down and eat together later. You could argue with somebody, walk away, cool off and come back the next day. You could have different opinions without deciding that the other person was evil. You could disagree with somebody without trying to make sure everybody else hated them too. There was a certain amount of social friction that people had to learn to navigate because you couldn’t simply block everybody out of your physical world.
Now we can create digital bubbles where everybody agrees with us, everybody talks like us, everybody thinks like us and everybody confirms what we already believe. Then the moment we encounter somebody who doesn’t fit inside that bubble, we treat them like an intruder. That’s not strength. That’s fragility. If your beliefs can only survive around people who agree with you, then you haven’t developed strong beliefs. You’ve developed an echo chamber.
Real confidence allows disagreement. Real intelligence can listen to an opposing argument without immediately becoming defensive. Real maturity understands that somebody can disagree with you without hating you. And real community requires enough emotional strength to survive differences.
ONE PERSON DOESN’T REPRESENT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE
This is where the conversation becomes especially important for the Black community. We have to stop allowing one person’s foolishness to become an indictment against an entire group. Somebody does something ridiculous online, and suddenly Black men are being discussed as though every Black man personally participated. A Black woman does something controversial, and suddenly every Black woman is expected to answer for it. Somebody makes a bad relationship decision, and suddenly an entire gender is declared hopeless.
That’s intellectually lazy. It’s also dangerous.
Human beings are individuals before they’re categories. Every person has a different upbringing, different wounds, different experiences, different values and different levels of emotional maturity. You can’t take one person’s behavior and use it as scientific evidence about an entire population. Yet social media encourages exactly that kind of thinking because outrage spreads faster when it’s attached to a larger group.
A person doing something foolish is a story about that person. It doesn’t automatically become a story about Black America. A bad relationship is a relationship problem. It doesn’t automatically become evidence that an entire gender is broken. A young person making a terrible decision doesn’t mean an entire generation has lost its mind. An older person making a terrible decision doesn’t mean everybody over a certain age is out of touch.
We have to learn how to keep the individual where the individual belongs. Otherwise, we spend our lives fighting imaginary representatives instead of dealing with actual human beings.
THE COMMENT SECTION HAS BECOME A SUBSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY
This is where I think we have to redefine what community actually means. Community isn’t simply a group of people who agree with you. Community should be able to support you, correct you, challenge you, teach you, encourage you and sometimes tell you that you’re completely wrong. Somebody who loves you enough to tell you the truth can be more valuable than a thousand strangers who tell you whatever makes you feel good.
That’s the difference between community and an echo chamber. An echo chamber tells you what you want to hear. Community gives you what you need to hear. An echo chamber protects your ego. Community can protect your future. An echo chamber makes you feel powerful. Community can make you accountable.
Real community has friction. Real community has elders and young people. Real community has different personalities and different opinions. Real community includes people who have made mistakes and people who are still learning. Real community requires patience because you can’t throw everybody away every time they disappoint you.
The internet has made it possible to create the illusion of community without actually having relationships. You can have thousands of followers and still have nobody who would come sit beside you when life falls apart. You can receive hundreds of comments and still feel completely alone when the phone goes silent. You can have people cheering for your opinion without having anybody who knows the real you.
That’s why we have to be careful about calling every digital connection community. Engagement isn’t necessarily intimacy. Followers aren’t necessarily friends. Agreement isn’t necessarily love. And an audience isn’t necessarily a family.
THE ALGORITHM DOESN’T CARE WHETHER YOU’RE HEALING
Here’s where the psychology gets even deeper. Social media platforms are designed around attention, and conflict can capture enormous amounts of attention. Anger makes people stop scrolling. Outrage makes people comment. Ridicule makes people share. Arguments create engagement. The system doesn’t know that you were trying to have a peaceful morning. It only knows that thousands of people suddenly became interested in an argument.
That creates an environment where people can learn that outrage gets rewarded. Somebody discovers that when they say something inflammatory, people rush into the comments. They discover that if they insult a particular group, people will fight them. They discover that if they make a sweeping statement about Black men or Black women, people will immediately start defending themselves. After a while, controversy can become a personality.
Now the person isn’t communicating anymore. They’re performing. They’re not trying to understand anybody. They’re trying to generate a reaction. And the audience becomes part of the machine.
That’s why I keep coming back to emotional discipline. You have to understand what your attention is worth. Every time you give somebody your attention, you’re giving them a piece of your life. You’re giving them your time. You’re giving them your mental energy. You’re allowing whatever they said to occupy space inside your mind.
Some things simply aren’t worth the rent.
THE BLACK MAN VERSUS BLACK WOMAN WAR
Nowhere does this become more obvious than in the endless arguments between Black men and Black women online. Every day there seems to be another argument about dating, marriage, masculinity, femininity, money, standards, attraction, loyalty and who supposedly needs whom more. The internet can make it look as though Black men and Black women are permanently at war.
Some people have turned dating into a courtroom. Everybody has evidence. Everybody has screenshots. Everybody has a story about somebody’s cousin, somebody’s ex, somebody’s friend or somebody they saw on the internet. Somebody says, “This is what Black women do.” Somebody responds, “This is what Black men do.” Then another person comes along and says, “That’s why I don’t date them anymore.”
Wait a minute. Who are we even talking about?
You can’t build healthy relationships while spending all day constructing arguments about why the opposite sex is terrible. If you constantly convince yourself that the people you’re supposed to connect with are dangerous, selfish, dishonest, disloyal or incapable of love, eventually you’re going to become emotionally prepared to be alone.
There are bad men. There are bad women. There are selfish people, dishonest people, immature people and emotionally unavailable people. But there are also good men and good women. There are people who want healthy relationships. There are people who want families. There are people who want peace. There are people who have learned from their mistakes and are trying to become better.
The internet doesn’t always show you those people because peace doesn’t always generate the same amount of noise as conflict. A healthy couple quietly loving one another isn’t nearly as entertaining as two strangers screaming at each other about gender roles. Yet if we allow the loudest people online to define our expectations of one another, we’re going to destroy relationships before they ever have a chance to begin.
WHAT MY GENERATION HAD TO LEARN THE HARD WAY
I’m 63 years old, and I’m not going to pretend that my generation got everything right. We had our problems too. We made mistakes. We had unhealthy relationships. We had bad communication. We carried emotional baggage. We had people who refused to change. Every generation has its problems.
But there was something we had to learn that technology has made much easier to avoid today: we had to live with people.
You couldn’t block your entire neighborhood. You couldn’t unfollow your auntie. You couldn’t mute your mother. You couldn’t delete your cousin because they said something you didn’t like. You had to figure out how to navigate people. You had to learn how to read body language. You had to learn when to speak, when to listen, when to apologize and when to walk away.
You also had to learn that not every conflict required an audience. If you had a problem with somebody, you could handle it between the two of you. Today, somebody can have an argument with one person and immediately bring ten thousand spectators into it. Now something that could have been resolved privately becomes public entertainment.
That’s a huge cultural shift. We’ve gone from learning how to live with difficult people to learning how to eliminate difficult people from our digital environments. Sometimes that’s necessary because boundaries matter. But there’s a difference between having healthy boundaries and becoming incapable of dealing with anybody who challenges you.
Life doesn’t work that way. Eventually, you’re going to encounter somebody you disagree with. You’re going to work with somebody you don’t like. You’re going to have a family member who gets on your nerves. You’re going to meet somebody whose personality clashes with yours. Maturity isn’t the ability to eliminate every difficult person. Sometimes maturity is learning how to maintain your peace while dealing with difficult people.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WIN EVERY ARGUMENT
One of the greatest signs of maturity is realizing that you don’t have to win every argument. I know that sounds simple, but apparently it’s one of the hardest lessons for people to learn.
Some arguments are traps. Some people aren’t trying to understand you. They’re trying to exhaust you. Some people aren’t asking questions because they want information. They’re setting bait. Some people don’t want a conversation. They want a reaction.
And when you give them that reaction, they’ve already won.
They don’t have to prove their argument. They don’t have to change your mind. They simply wanted to get you emotionally involved, and you volunteered. You gave them your time, your attention and your peace.
That’s why I’ve learned that every battle doesn’t deserve my participation. At my age, I’ve seen enough human behavior to understand that you cannot debate stupidity out of somebody. You cannot reason with somebody who has made up their mind that they don’t want to reason. Sometimes the smartest thing you can say is nothing.
There’s wisdom in walking away.
WHEN THE “OLD MAN” HAS TO SAY SOMETHING
I’m 63, so I’m allowed to have one of those old-man moments every now and then. I’ve lived long enough to watch technology go from something that seemed almost magical to something that’s now sitting in everybody’s pocket. We have smartphones, artificial intelligence, instant communication, video calls, social media and access to more information than any previous generation could have imagined.
And yet somehow, with all of this incredible technology, people still can’t leave a fool alone.
Back in the day, somebody’s grandmother might have looked at them and said, “Baby, leave that fool alone.” That might have been the entire lesson. Now we have a twelve-page comment, three response videos, somebody reacting to the response video and somebody else creating a podcast about the argument.
We’ve turned “leave that fool alone” into a media franchise.
And maybe we need to return to some of that old wisdom. Sometimes you really do need to leave the fool alone. Not because you’re afraid. Not because you lost. Not because you don’t have anything to say. You leave the fool alone because your peace is worth more than proving a point to somebody who doesn’t matter to your life.
WHAT ARE WE REALLY HUNGRY FOR?
So why are people doing this? Why are people so desperate to be heard? Why does a stranger’s disagreement feel so threatening? Why does somebody need to respond to every criticism? Why does somebody feel compelled to turn every disagreement into a public battle?
Maybe part of the answer is that people are hungry for validation.
People want to feel seen. They want to feel important. They want to feel respected. They want to feel that their opinions matter. They want somebody to recognize them. And the internet can provide that feeling instantly.
A person who feels invisible in their everyday life can suddenly make one comment and receive fifty responses. People are quoting them. People are agreeing with them. People are attacking them. People are sharing their words. Suddenly, for a few minutes, that person feels important.
That feeling can become addictive.
And once somebody learns that controversy gives them attention, they may begin creating controversy simply to experience that attention again. The argument becomes the drug. The reaction becomes the reward. The audience becomes the validation.
That’s why we have to look beyond the behavior and understand the psychology behind it. Sometimes the loudest person in the room isn’t the strongest person in the room. Sometimes the loudest person is simply the person who desperately needs to be heard.
WHAT ARE WE BUILDING?
That brings me back to the question I started with: when did this become community? Because if we spend all day attacking each other, what are we actually building? If Black men spend all day explaining why Black women are the problem, what are we building? If Black women spend all day explaining why Black men are the problem, what are we building? If older people spend all day insulting younger people, what are we building? If younger people spend all day insulting older people, what are we building? If everybody is busy proving that everybody else is the problem, who’s left to build anything? That’s the question I want people to sit with.
Because complaining about the condition of the community while spending your time attacking everybody inside the community is a contradiction. You can’t say you want unity while constantly feeding division. You can’t say you want healthy relationships while teaching people to distrust an entire gender. You can’t say you want peace while spending your days looking for somebody to fight. At some point, we have to become more interested in building than arguing.
COMMUNITY IS MORE THAN A COMMENT SECTION
Community is built when people can sit across from each other and disagree without destroying the relationship. Community is built when somebody can correct you without becoming your enemy. Community is built when people can laugh together, cry together, teach each other and hold each other accountable. Community means somebody knows who you really are when the camera is off. Community means somebody will check on you when you disappear. Community means somebody can tell you that you’re wrong and you’ll actually listen. Community means somebody can forgive you after you make a mistake. Community means you can disagree today and still have enough love and maturity to talk tomorrow.
That’s something a comment section can’t manufacture. A comment section can give you an audience, but it can’t automatically give you relationships. It can give you engagement, but it can’t automatically give you intimacy. It can give you visibility, but it can’t automatically give you belonging. We have to stop confusing those things.
THE PEACE YOU KEEP MAY BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE ARGUMENT YOU WIN
I’m not telling anybody to leave social media. I’m not telling anybody to stop speaking their mind. I’m not telling anybody to accept disrespect. I’m not telling anybody to become silent when something genuinely needs to be addressed. Sometimes you have to speak. Sometimes you have to challenge something. Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself. But you also have to know when the conversation has stopped being productive.
You have to know when somebody is baiting you. You have to know when the conversation has become entertainment. You have to know when you’re no longer communicating and you’re simply exchanging insults. And most importantly, you have to know when your peace is worth more than your response.
Because every time you respond, you’re making a decision about where your attention goes. Every time you enter an argument, you’re spending part of your life. You can’t get that time back. That’s why I’m asking people to start looking at social media differently. Before you respond, ask yourself whether the person you’re arguing with actually matters in your real life. Ask yourself whether this conversation is going to improve anything. Ask yourself whether you’re responding because you have something valuable to contribute or because somebody successfully pushed your emotional button. Sometimes the answer is going to be uncomfortable. Sometimes you’re going to realize that you’re not defending a principle. You’re defending your ego.
WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT EVERYBODY
There’s a point where we have to step back and recognize what we’re doing to ourselves. We’ve spent years fighting strangers. We’ve fought people we’ve never met. We’ve fought people from different cities, different generations, different political viewpoints, different economic backgrounds and different relationship experiences. We’ve fought Black men. We’ve fought Black women. We’ve fought young people. We’ve fought older people. We’ve fought people who look like us and people who think differently from us. And while we were fighting everybody, we may have forgotten to build anything together.
That’s the part that bothers me. Because there’s a difference between being connected and being united. There’s a difference between having access to one another and actually knowing one another. There’s a difference between having an audience and having a community. Social media can connect us, but it can’t do the work for us. We still have to learn how to listen. We still have to learn how to disagree. We still have to learn how to forgive. We still have to learn how to communicate. We still have to learn how to love people who aren’t exactly like us. And we still have to learn when to walk away.
EVERYBODY DOESN’T DESERVE A RESPONSE
I’m not asking anybody to become passive. I’m asking people to become intentional. There’s a difference. You don’t have to respond to everything. You don’t have to correct everybody. You don’t have to defend yourself against every accusation. You don’t have to prove your intelligence to strangers. You don’t have to participate in every argument simply because somebody tagged you. Sometimes the greatest display of emotional intelligence is refusing to participate. Sometimes the strongest person in the conversation is the one who recognizes that the conversation has become pointless and leaves.
Sometimes the person who looks like they walked away from the argument actually won something far more valuable. They won their peace. And at 63 years old, I can tell you that peace becomes more valuable the longer you live. You start realizing that your time is limited. Your energy is limited. Your attention is limited. You start becoming much more selective about what deserves a piece of you. That’s why I don’t believe everybody deserves access to your emotions.
COMMUNITY IS BUILT IN REAL LIFE
So let’s remember what community really looks like. Community isn’t simply people agreeing with you online. Community is people standing beside you when life gets difficult. Community is somebody correcting you when you’re heading in the wrong direction. Community is somebody celebrating you without being jealous of you. Community is somebody telling you the truth even when the truth isn’t comfortable.
Community is human. Community requires patience. Community requires responsibility. Community requires forgiveness. Community requires accountability. And sometimes community requires you to sit across from somebody you disagree with and remember that they’re still a human being.
That’s what we need to recover. Not some fantasy where everybody agrees. Not some imaginary world where nobody makes mistakes. Not some social-media paradise where everybody thinks exactly the way we think. We need the kind of community where disagreement doesn’t automatically mean destruction.
KEEP YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE AND KEEP SCROLLING
So the next time you see something online that gets under your skin, before you type that seventeen-paragraph response, stop for a moment. Take a breath. Ask yourself why you’re responding. Ask yourself whether the person on the other side actually matters to your life. Ask yourself whether this conversation is going to build something or simply give two strangers an opportunity to make each other angry.
Because everybody doesn’t deserve a response. Everybody doesn’t deserve your explanation. Everybody doesn’t deserve your attention. Everybody doesn’t deserve access to your emotions. Sometimes you have to protect your peace the same way you protect your money. You don’t hand your money to everybody who asks for it, so why are you handing your emotional energy to every stranger who provokes you?
Keep your blood pressure. Keep your sanity. Keep your peace. And keep on scrolling. Because the next time somebody online says something completely ridiculous, you don’t necessarily have to educate them. You don’t necessarily have to correct them. You don’t necessarily have to prove them wrong. Sometimes you can simply look at that screen, shake your head, put the phone down and remember something that our elders understood long before the internet ever existed.
Some people are simply not worth the argument. And everybody doesn’t deserve a response. Some people deserve a scroll.
SCURV
