One of those catchy headlines in online news clips that caught my attention was one where a man mistakes an international recruitment call from Amazon as spam and does not receive it. This man missed an opportunity all because of the deep-seated fear and hatred that we have all begun to have for spammers. This is an erosion of trust that society could have lived without. This is the end of the wonderful dreams we all had about social media. The reasons are those turncoats, betrayers, backstabbing miscreants, marauders, reprobates, treacherous ingrates who transform human trust into despicable suspicion.
It is not that this erosion of trust connects only to spam calls and social media updates. The real world has a fair share of predatory deceivers. I recollect stopping my car zillions of times to help strangers on lonely stretches… or to willingly give a lift on highways… or to even go out my way to drop someone to a place where the right transport is available. All this is past. There have been so many cases about young girls robbing kind-hearted drivers who agreed to give them lift, or dodgy people forcing one out of one’s own car and speeding away, or even killing people for a pittance… all such reports make people place their kindness impulses into the deep-freeze of existence. Look at the way ill-prepared students and inept professionals falsely charge their teachers, professors, or seniors with misdemeanor or molestation when they fail to keep up to the performance expected. All these incidents lead to, as I have already said, an erosion of trust.
I have been blocking hundreds of phone numbers on my smartphone simply because spammers just go on and on about one thing or the other. If I need to buy insurance policy, property, open another savings account, invest in shares, or enroll in a course, I can look up information the way I prefer to. I do not need a spammer to force me into hearing out his bloody pitch about an inane piece of land when all I want to buy is a new laptop. The irony is that when I am looking for a laptop, there will be calls asking me to invest in property… they never get it right. The only solution is to make them stop. Therefore, I block them all. Not just phone numbers but contacts on social media platforms as well. The negative fallout of such nefarious and irresponsible actions of spammers is that now I have stopped logging on to all platforms except Instagram. I have begun to scowl at that ting-ting that tells me there is yet another bloody ‘good morning’ message on some godforsaken WhatsApp group that I cannot leave for personal reasons. I am certainly getting more tolerant but in a churlish fashion.
Blocking helps. Frees me to some extent from the thousands of frauds, swindles, and relentless telemarketing… but there is an increasing reluctance to answer important calls from unfamiliar numbers. This reflects a broader societal shift where people are growing more cautious and less trusting of strangers, whether over the phone or in real life. The outcome of this unhealthy trend is that jobseekers lose opportunities, lost people wait helplessly, travelers wait for some accidental Samaritan, and goodness in people dozes. There is an increased hesitance to help strangers on highways or in public spaces… acts of kindness replaced by outright denials to help. What with increasing reports of crime, carjackings, and frauds, people now think twice before stopping for a hitchhiker. Likewise, if someone is lying injured on the road, people hesitate to help, fearing legal complications or even potential harm. Just as phone users block unknown numbers for safety, drivers avoid stopping for strangers to protect themselves.
Our ability to differentiate between threats and genuine calls for help seems to be damaged. Life walled by fear. We think we see things as they are… and I hope we not seeing things as we are. I believe we ought to be connecting better with others, tuning in, so to say… as it is never a promising idea to live only of ourselves. I am sure this will be possible faster when spam calls and predatory deceivers face tough action by the law enforcement agencies.
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Arvind Passey
Written on 21 February 2025
