You know the feeling. It's eight in the morning and you wake up to the sound of a blaring alarm clock. You hit the snooze button twice but there's no escaping the inevitable; why did you sign up for an 8:30 a.m. class? Oh yeah, that's right. You wanted to take the PE course that's based around the cup song in "Pitch Perfect" and it's only offered at 8:30. It's already 8:15! You only have 15 minutes to obsessively check your notifications from the night before. Hmmm, there appears to be a little number 2 encircled in red next to your Facebook icon. Two notifications! You think you're dreaming. Your heart beats faster and faster as your Facebook app loads: your timeline materializes before your eyes. With a shaking index finger you press the notifications icon at the bottom of the screen. Your heart drops. One notification is for the birthday of someone you've never met and the other tells you that your dad liked your profile picture. In high school, the opportunity to wish an online happy birthday to a stranger would've filled you with joy, but those innocent days of youth are gone.
As you put on your shoes and head to class, you reminisce about the time in your life when you couldn't go a day without receiving a request to play Farmville. Back in those days, you ignored every single one of those requests, believing yourself to be above such a childish game. Why would I play Farmville when I could partake in more productive activities like going to Youtube comment sections in order to whine about the friend zone? Nothing rings more true than the words of Andy from "The Office": "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." The once green virtual pastures of Farmville have been paved over and most people don't even care.
You arrive at your class and sign in, but your mind is elsewhere. Just four years ago, you were able to assure yourself that no matter how weird you were, there were stranger people in your class: the Farmville players. But today you look around and don't know where you stand socially. The worst part is that all this pain could've been avoided. You could've responded to any of those daily requests but you turned a blind eye to the only people who truly cared about you. They're all gone; they deleted their Facebook accounts to focus on their music career. You were offered the blue pill every single day but you chose the desolation of a non-Farmville reality. Now you wonder if the true state of the universe is a Farmville account and if the world you've always held up as real is no more than a figment of your pathetic imagination.
You stop pitying yourself for a moment and stare into the eyes of the girl next to you. There it is: the glint in her eye suggests understanding. She too has been asking herself why nobody has been sending her Farmville requests. Together you leave class. Together you walk down the empty hallway and listen to your own footsteps. Together you shed a tear for a world that could have been. She holds open the door for you and you thank her. As she starts to walk away, you summon all your courage and ask her the question. She turns back and shakes her head. "It's too late," she says.
Perhaps you never would've been a good virtual farmer in the first place. Maybe you stopped receiving requests because the people who invited you were hurt too many times by your rejections. Yet in the back of your mind, you know the real reason nobody sends you Farmville requests anymore. The truth is, the world wasn't made for virtual farmers to succeed. All those movies where the little guy overcomes the strength of the big, bad bully were never more than a source of false hope.
Your phone vibrates in your pocket; you stare down at the screen and see a notification. Eric BeastMode Anderson has sent you a Farmville request. You instantly unfriend him. When will we ever learn.
