The story of the Shepherd who cried Wolf comes to mind whenever the story of another clout chaser(s) comes online. It was a story that stuck to my mind because it carries a powerful lesson and because I read it twice in two different books. Both stories had their variations but the lesson remained the same. These stories I had read in primary and junior secondary school or read them both in either. My memory of when I read it is a bit jumbled but here is the summary of the story.
There was this shepherd who used to live in a particular place. He would take his sheep for grazing far and outside the village. So one day he thought it cool to play a trick on the villagers, so he ran back to the village after taking his flock out for grazing. He started to scream wolf, wolf. The wolf was attacking his flock. The villagers felt pity for him and ran out to help him but on getting there, they discovered it was just a trick. Angry that their activities were disrupted over a lie, they left.
The story didn't stop there, the shepherd played the same wolf trick on the few too trusting villagers who believed him the second time. These villagers so pained swore never to believe anything that came out of his mouth again.
And the real attack came one day while he was out grazing. Wolves came for his flock, attacking his sheep. This man ran to the village, crying for help but no one believed him. Everything he said fell on deaf ears. They thought he came to deceive them. That was how this man lost everything.
While it may be fun to chase clout for whatever advantage you hope to gain at the end of it. It starts to make people sceptical about everything that comes from you. Even when it is true, people will doubt you and you may think that is not so bad until you genuinely need help.
Why all this long talk?
Well, this write-up is just my piece about the numerous drama going on in cyberspace. The most recent is of a social media celebrity couple that I had no idea about them until recently. Their story rents almost every space on the online media and I was forced to check them out.
So now I believe whatever becomes the outcome of this drama, life will go on but in the meantime, they have the attention of many and their social media pages have seen a huge boost. This is good by the way as there's no such thing as bad publicity. You can ask Shimon Hayut (aka Simon Leviev of Nexflix's Tinder Swindler documentary) about that.
But, a big but. Whatever that goes online stays there forever, clout chasing or not. So before putting out anything online, ask yourself, twenty years from now, would I regret ever putting this out? Because whether you like it or not, people will always dig out this information to use against you.
So to end this probably hurried piece🙂, here's what I have to say. Be mindful of what you say online, be careful of the things you do and above all guard your privacy well. At the end of the day your private moments, your intimate acts are just another content for a desperate blogger trying to feed the ever-hungry public.
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