Anna Bettina H. Andaya Reaction Paper: “Are We All Braggarts Now?”

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According to the said Wall Street Journal article, people tend to boast about themselves

on social networking sites because they would like to feel good about themselves. The internet

enables them to achieve this because through it they will be able to show many people what they

have gained without even having face-to-face contact with them. In addition, the feeling of

getting embarrassed is somehow eliminated or lessened.

Personally, I am not guilty of this. Compared to other people, I only use these sites for

getting announcements from the university or hand-outs from some of my teachers, contacting

my high school friends, being updated with the current events here in the country and abroad, as

well as learning about new knowledge. In fact, it was only when I entered college that I decided

to create a Facebook account. It was because of a teacher who said that she would be posting the

class announcements and hand-outs there. Nevertheless, I do agree that there are many who do

this. I have observed this numerous times. In the aforementioned site, there are people who

would post pictures of their new stuff, the food that they ordered from a restaurant, or of

themselves in the places they went to for their vacation. There are also some who would place

glamour shots of themselves, which clearly shows how attractive they are, but would put a

caption that says the opposite.

Whatever form it may be, I think that people are actually aware of this. They are just not

taking any action on it because they probably would like to remain on good terms with those

individuals. I have also seen this in a number of sites. There, people use humor and sarcasm in

making their points. For instance, many say that they have lose their “faith in humanity” because

of these people, while there are others who advice to simply not imitate those. As an example,

there was this picture which compiles the rants made by some teenagers regarding what their

parents got them for Christmas. One complained that he wants an iPhone 5s, but his parents gave

him an iPhone 5. Another said that she wants a Macbook Pro, but she was given a Macbook Air.

The main message of this post is that we should be grateful and contented for what we have,

because there are people out there who do not enjoy the same things as us. Aside from this, I also

thought that instead of posting this, why not tell those people to stop complaining and just learn

to appreciate what they have. In addition, doesn’t this show that they think that they are better

than those people?

To conclude, the article also poses to us the question of “how is your life measured?”

Would it be by merely having other people recognize our accomplishments? Or is it by

something more profound than that, like the changes we made in other people’s lives? In my

opinion, there are a lot ways by which we can measure our lives. It could be by the personal

achievements we made, or our contributions to the growth of society. It only depends on us, and

I think that being acknowledged for it is just a bonus because there are things that matter more.

To answer the said question, I would consider the many roles I play in my life. Some of

these are as a student, a daughter, a Christian, and a Filipino citizen. For the first, the measure

that I would take would be whether I will be able to apply in my everyday life the things that I

have learned in school and at the university. The second and third would be whether I will be

able to uphold the values that were taught to me by my parents and the church. As for the fourth,

it would be my contribution to the betterment of our country.