How Justin Bieber Personally Ruined My Life

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually him.  Maybe it was whoever operates his Twitter account.  But his name is on it, so the blame starts there.

First, the backstory.

Last week, I noticed a Twitter trending topic that said “Justin Deserves Our Love.”

Never one to pass up a chance to make a sociological comment about an otherwise inane trending topic, I tweeted, “Justin Deserves Our Love, you say? So do all humans. Funny how we usually forget that.”

And funnier still was what happened next:

Uh oh.

Evidently, Mr. Bieber (or his handlers) saw my tweet and found it relevant (or else it just randomly showed up in their computerized matrix of Wishes to Grant and Lives to Destroy), and decided that I was a bloke worth following.

And that one single button click momentarily ruined my life.

Night of the Biebing Dead

Now, let’s be clear about something: I’m neither a Justin Bieber fan nor a detractor.

I really don’t have any opinion on him at all, because I’ve never heard his music, except for that one Christmas song he did last year, and I only heard that once.  (Curse you, holiday radio…)

So, for all I know, Justin Bieber is the most talented performer of all time.  Or, he’s a complete hack.  I really have no idea, nor do I care, because — like the Jonas Brothers, or Selena Gomez, or Miley Cyrus, or any other musical artist who’s half my age, I haven’t paid any attention to them.

But boy, do Justin Bieber fans pay a LOT of attention to me.

See, shortly after being followed by the Biebs, I started getting followed by tweenage Bieber fans in a steady, rabid stream.  People with Twitter descriptions like this:

This went on for days.

At first, I tried to ignore them, but their sycophantic clinginess unnerved me.  I really didn’t want to be the guy with a sudden global entourage of rabid Bieber fans, whose bios included phrases like:

“[JUSTIN BIEBER] FOLLOWED ME 20/5/11 AT 5.10PM BEST DAY OF MY LIFE.”

and:

“my biggest wish is that justin start follow me, i love u justin and i know that u love me to ,so please follow me!”

(Emphasis mine, because WTF????)

The boundless enthusiasm of youth is supposed to be inspiring, not terrifying.  But seeing the meaning and fulfillment of these kids’ lives reduced to whether or not Justin Bieber clicks a button on his iPhone is like volunteering to have your soul crushed.

So, I started blocking them.

I didn’t want to mark them as spam, because they weren’t exactly spamming me.  What they were doing was indoctrinating me into their endless hell of which I wanted no part.

(ASIDE: Seriously, the cult-like devotion they have to their pursuit of an imagined utopia, as embodied by a glance of attention from a barely-legal stranger, is fascinatingly bleak.  And realizing that they’re all self-perpetuating this dystopia willingly, and using it as a bond of commonality, makes me wonder what we’re doing wrong when it comes to helping kids set achievable and mutually beneficial goals.  But I digress.)

It didn’t matter.  Blocking them didn’t help; they just kept coming.

Evidently, the part of most of their profiles that says “follow me and I’ll follow you back!!!!!!” ignores the part where I didn’t actually follow them in the first place.

Nor did I ever follow Him.  My only sin was that He had followed me.

So, I tried something different.

I blocked Bieber.

I figured that me not showing up in his list of people he’d followed would somehow protect me from the followonslaught of his devotees… but I was wrong.  Because so many of them had already followed me, and because they all slavishly follow each other like a cult of lepers in search of a drop of ointment from above, I was doomed.

Doomed to drown in a sea of Beliebers.

I was starting to weigh the option of killing my Twitter account and starting all over again, from scratch, just to be rid of Biebergeddon when Burgh Baby suggested I might be looking at this all wrong.  Maybe I could use this somehow.  After all, as she herself has learned, there are benefits to Bieber bribery.  Maybe I could put my own army of tireless idolators to work somehow, on my own behalf?

It was almost tempting… except for the fact that these kids don’t actually respond to prompts.

To test the waters of zombie control, I had asked them directly (via tweet) exactly WHY they’re all in the habit of following one another.  I didn’t really even care about the answer; I just wanted to know if any of them would comprehend the question.

No answer.

Their virus-infected minds exist only to consume and regurgitate.

So, ultimately, I did the only other thing I could possibly do in this situation:

I waited it out.

I stopped blocking them and let the swarm reach its apex, knowing that eventually their attention span would die off and they’d shuffle away to plague some other poor bastard that Bieber had accidentally followed when he meant to favorite (or however this whole thing happened).

And it did.

Over the weekend, their activity crested and eroded.

They came, they saw, they followed.  And then they moved on.

Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled life, without the gnawing fear that a 12 year-old Belgian girl thinks I’m closer to heaven than she is just because of my Twitter cachet.  (There’s a lesson here for all of us, especially if you work in social marketing, but you’ll have to connect those dots yourself.)

In the end, I survived Justin Bieber, and I learned a secret that could save your digital life, too:

When the feeding begins, just play dead.  (They can’t tell the difference.)

On a related note, new episodes of AMC’s The Walking Dead return next month.

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Tags: Armchair Sociology, audience, bullshit, networking, perception, trending topics, Twitter