Does anyone do anything for nothing these days?
Are we all doing stuff for other people secretly hoping that they will do something back for us in return?
On Twitter, which is where I first found out about the followback mentality, people will follow you on Twitter and if you don’t follow back they’ll unfollow you. I don’t get the reasoning behind this but when @MudiwaHood unfollowed everyone some tweeps were bitter and #UnfollowMudiwa ensued. Just follow people who you are genuinely interested in. People that give you valuable tweets. Don’t follow for the sake of numbers. Quality over quantity. Having a higher ratio of followers to following you is not a reflection of you.
How does the followback mentality translate to real life?
I watched this one video where this guy is sitting with a girl and they are eating. The girl then says I am on my period and the guy snatches the burger from her and starts eating it himself while muttering something about how upset he was. The people in my office were laughing at that video but I didn’t find it funny at all. This you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours is the reason our teenage girls are catching sexually transmitted diseases over pizza or worse, airtime.
Have you read the shocking HIV new infections stats? Click here: https://www.chronicle.co.zw/zim-records-250-new-hiv-infections-weekly/
The most pain post break-up is due to this ‘they owe me’ mentality. So what you’ve put in work? So what you’ve made sacrifices? So what you stayed loyal and true and they cheated? Nobody owes you anything. Don’t do anything in a relationship that isn’t out of the goodness of your heart. You will end up bitter and unsatisfied. You can’t buy love with money or actions. It does not happen.
Even with the Christians this kind of flawed thinking is prevalent. Sometimes we help people in our lives so that God can owe us pressed down, shaken together and spilling over. I have a friend that has behaved sexually in life and she is bitter about how she is still unmarried and yet she has practiced sexual restraint. She says all the promiscuous baddies are married and she doesn’t understand why her virtue has not been rewarded. I have the answer and its simple, you can’t bargain with God. He said works will no longer work in the new testament. Stop feeling entitled.
This is my challenge for everyone reading this post. Do something for somebody else and expect nothing in return. You can’t even have the warm fuzzy feeling. Hopefully it’s a mental flaw that we can start to fix and bring back ubuntu.
