Perusing social media has become an exercise in wading through arrogance disguised as humility. There's always a tweet thanking God for some or other opportunity, a status announcing a great achievement as though it's nothing or, the ultimate, "I am so humbled that I was selected to/for…"

Slavoj Žižek once lamented that “Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.” I tend to agree from what I read on the internet. There is so much threat of doing something interesting but so little of the execution.


This is the social networking philosophy I have adopted and it seems to be working relatively well. It compels me to do things for the sake of enjoyment and putting it on the internet. As a result, I'm all the richer for doing more enjoyable things for the sake of bragging to the internet about how amazing my life is.

Currently, the internet should be well aware that I am on a calling to taste as many craft beers as I can lay my hands on. It is not the most arduous assignment I've ever undertaken but possibly the most pleasurable. For a start, I get to enjoy many variations of the liquid stuff. Let's face it, after you've tried the ciabatta, whole-wheat, rye and French, you're pretty limited when it comes to beer's solid format counterpart…but beer itself…the possibilities are endless.

The other satisfying feature is that no matter how terrible my day is, I always know it will end in something delightful for me. If, on the other hand, if a mates has had a terrible day, they get to go home, fire up their internet browsers and see me, being happy with interesting beer, further aggravating their pain and sorrow (I should warn that this plan is ineffective with regards to non-drinkers and wine lovers). At this point, I should thank my friend, the internet, for being available to entertain my schadenfreude and compel me to pursue interesting components of my life.

I should also thank the good people at the League of Beer for keeping me in fresh supply. I imagine somebody there had a similar idea and thought, "You know what would make me better than anybody else? If I had the power to deliver interesting beer to people all over South Africa"…GENIOUS! There was no mitigation or trying to be artificially humble there. It was merely a matter of, here is an awesome idea and now let's do it.


Gilroy's, my favourite local brewery, has a gauntlet with the middle finger erect on its coat of arms – a challenge to any other brewery to brew a better beer. One rarely finds such a commendable combination of confidence and pride. This isn't a challenge to say that they will brew a better beer or that they have the capacity or are in a position to brew a better beer. This is an assertion that they do brew a better beer than anybody else.


There's no reason, however, to point the finger (except the proverbial Gilroy one) at the upper echelons of society. It can start with us. If we made the effort to do amazing things that we're proud of and can brag about, we'd do more amazing things.


If we all took a little time out of our day to tell the world how much better we are than each other, we may just may force each other's' live to be a little bit better.

Cheers