I have always found myself questioning the phrase sprinkled into all the youths’ conversations when they find themselves in disbelief: “Are you for real?” To me, ‘for real’ seemed grammatically incorrect and I found it hard to understand, hard to grasp the concept of being ‘for the truth.’ This common interjection to highlight the debate of whether the statement was sincere or not appeared so slangish to me at first, I found it ridiculous. Why not just ask “Are you telling the truth?” Eventually, I honestly just came to the conclusion it was another stupid saying and passed it by.
But when you asked me to really analyse its indepth meaning, some interest was sparked within me. In the generation we live in swarmed with AI plaguing the internet and technology with the capacity to fake so much information, I guess we as the younger generation can’t avoid the constant lies we are told since our whole lives depend on these platforms. To be ‘for real’ is almost to be in favour of the truth – in times of shock, we find ourselves asking what’s genuine and what’s not since authenticity has become a luxury in a world full of fabricated tales.
Naturally, if we are ‘for’ something, we must be against the opposite. Falsehood. It’s our undeniable enemy as teenagers who rely on devices nowadays if misleading statements and deceit make navigating our online lives so much harder. And let’s face it; our online lives have made up for most of our existence. I think I can speak for most people my age that our lives on the web have built up substantial pieces of our identities, and we all want to build our knowledge which contributes to our personality through the facts, not the fakes.
“Are you for real” isn’t just some poorly phrased lingo the children say when surprised – it has layers to it that you explore only when giving it more thought. Our first instinct when reacting to something unknown is to distinguish between what is real and what is not due to how the inventions of society have created a world full of fraud and imitation. Disinformation is the opponents of children. It surrounds us from the moment we wake up to the moment our head hits the pillow. So now we find ourselves fending off untruth constantly.
I’m not quite sure what it is to be for real. But with a roughly shaped idea in my mind, I must ask the simple yet profound question.
Dear World, are you for real?