After traveling and going through foreign experiences a good deal in our life. We get to see the same people and places in a very different way.
For starters, once we’ve had a few experiences, it allows for a more diversified and confident standing in one’s perception of the world around. The development of our own world view creates differences in how we co-exist and exchange with others. Respect becomes more fundamental. As does the importance of taking care of ourselves; which in turn allows us to care for others at a greater extent. Just as the saying goes “It is by learning to love ourselves, that we learn to better love others…”.
Letting go of the importance of others opinions in the process of our construction. Being confronted with others long enough will fuel a need to focus more on ourselves as we come to expose what needs to be worked on. “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” We discover the need for boundaries and limitations as we confront our newfound realities with our old relationships or in the words of Mahatma Gandhi -“A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”
Depending on how open our mind is and how accepting we are of the unavoidable challenges life brings to us. We might find ourselves either putting our heads in the sand waiting for the tigers to pass us by, or decide to force on through the jungle of our illusions.
Moving to the other-side of the world isn’t necessarily where they find the answer they are looking for. In fact quite to the contrary. By taking a job in another country, I often find that I get to experience a variation of what I am living at home, on the inside. So it stands to reason that I’d want to do more inner work in order to experience better externalities.
Searching for answers only I can find inside of myself, spending any time outside can become futile and even repetitive.
In the book, “A technique for producing ideas” by James Webb Young, the process of “Digesting ideas” and “Different combinations” explains a good deal about how our mind takes in information and then spits it out in the form of perfect ideas. This process of creation is how many fruitful ideas come to be.
I normally find that, from boredom comes creation. It is when I sit still and stay with what ever is making me bored and combining that with something I want to do. That is when the creation begins.
With such technological advancement and such commercial competitiveness and innovation; nearly everyone has access to a smart device with internet. This access, even homeless guys in Barcelona with their shopping carts sitting on the side of cafés to get free wifi, have more or less the capacity to evolve on the same level as anyone at home in Paris. Information is out there in abundance.
Never have human-beings been exposed to so much information. “Information used to be as rare and precious as gold. (It is estimated that one weekday edition of today’s New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime.” Hence, the need to be highly selective with the curation of what we put in our minds.
Creating a plan or list of short term goals to accomplish is very easy to Execute.
It is by imposing the pressure of building a mountain in one night that we get crushed by that same mountain. This creates inertia or paralysis in our action taking. It is by placing a small stone everyday that a mountain comes to be formed, so to speak.
Though, in order to keep one’s mind vivid, it’s important to cut off from outlets like social media or youtube or netflix and others alike as they can rapidly take over our task at hand and we’ll find ourselves having lost a few hours listening or watching something unrelated to the task we had.
Being able to drift is important, even if you are working intently towards a project, it is very easy to forget the outside world and just focus unproductively on a task for hours at a time.
What’s so important about it?
The fact we drift while working, is simply that the task at hand is less interesting to us than what we think or what is actually on our phone. Our work is sometimes less interesting to us than what we would rather be doing.
Times of hyper productivity, and times of Sloth-like hibernation.
I apply my own dual function of sloth like rest and hyper productivity in to this idea.
When you focus on the task at hand , you have bursts of productive energy which becomes very creative and this ultimately makes for better work.
When I have the idea that I’m not working hard enough, (even if I am.) I go and make a chess move and this gives me the notion that I’m not working hard enough, because on one side of my mind I’ve allowed myself to play.
This “Play-work” Technique has allowed me to end my work days, with the entire notion of fulfilling all my tasks, having high results and being able to leave the office full of energy and creativity to complete what I want to complete.
Simply because I have played my Tetris or Chess for minor periods of time during my day. I get to decompress while I work, and focus intently and then go about my tasks and goals once I leave the office at full capacity of energy and creativity.
I find myself repeatedly agreeing to the fact that if something is important enough to us, we’ll get it done. Be it inside of our head or in physical reality.
Stepping away from people who need immediate results may be a solution which might bear its fruits on the long term…
Maybe I wasn’t in the right place, maybe they weren’t the right people.
When the people surrounding us matter, our phones stay tucked away and we go away feeling revived and awake rather than wondering why we lost our time.
To me it seems like the rise of social media is in order to at first give us importance ( facebook), then to diversify our intrests (pintrest/instagram), then for us to find our voice (twitter) after having searched if we are correct or not before (google). Though above all, learning to turn off our devices and just take a breath of fresh air…
Our standards have drastically been altered. Being confronted with a constant visual stimulus of change has hardwired us to pick, sift and sort what we think we most desire and/or (depending on our evolution) need in order to be happy, or in other words, what we think we need in order to fit into our respective groupe/tribe.
The emergence of social media and internet has given us insight, in fact tremendous insight, into our core fibers as singular individuals among the crowd in which we blend day in and day out in our everyday lives. Having a smart phone with access to everything happening everywhere all the time, has given us an almost God-like impression of power over our decisions and choices regarding what we do with our time, money and effort. Yet, if we look closely, we’re very far from God like action.
Mostly anyone with an instagram account has had access to entrepreneurial information, insight into beauty tips, luxury tips, photography, bitcoin, world pollution… ; this leads us to learn how to acknowledge our neighbors and understand a bit (a lot) about them. Which also creates an envy for others lives, which can be perceived as “healthy peer pressure” in order to up our standards. Or most likely, people can up their standards so high that human beings cannot attain them… This can also create pressure that we cannot support due to not being in the right frame or mind or health. Which can trigger profound things in us. This also leads to a downside, that some of us are starting to encounter. Virtual realities and especially make-believe realities do not exist or are physically unachievable and the actuality of the lives lived on Instagram aren’t always as glamorous as they seem.
Our attention span has been shortened and people who are avid users, tend to “log off” from their tangible realities as soon as what is being said/seen doesn’t interest them. This also applies for discussions, dating, and many other topics. Could we say people’s patience has been shortened too?
This breeds a lack of tolerance for anyone who isn’t already in a space of mastery. Which seems inhumain from the perception of anyone who is a little weak, or who hasn’t yet reached that level of success in their domain.
We witness a Big contrast between one’s reality and other peoples realities, which makes it hard to accept the realities some of us are experiencing. If we don’t own a 7 star hotel in Dubai, are we worthy of anyone’s attention? Lets hope kindness and humor make up for our apparent material lack..
Lots of time wasting dreaming about what others are doing in some distant paradise, while we twiddle our thumbs in our dingy humid caves.
Judgement precision bias. People are now judged on their profiles. Instead of actually knowing about the people at hand. We now get to see the people we are talking to, we see their photography skills, their surroundings, and we see what they stand for, or at least their capacity to sell or write themselves up, or not.
Will we get back to meeting people like we used to? Do we really need our phones in order to live optimal lives? Do we need to keep up with everything? …
Why social media is a painfully unrealistic indicator of comparison?
Before social media, and expanding our knowledge of what others have, we ultimately weren’t worried about missing out or even aware that other people had it so good, or had differently. The idea that everyone gets to see what is happening next door is also detrimental. For a number of reasons. 1- Constant need to keep up with what is going on next door. 2- We can’t compete with others without destroying ourselves in the process. We can only compete with our own limitations. 3- The fear of missing out paralyses the individual in a state of needing to constantly check what is going on which furthers the vicious loop. 4- Privacy no longer has any meaning. 5- Everyone wants what everyone else has. Originality therefore suffers. 6- What was once rare, is now common place. 7- Time can be spent going between our own inadequacy, and others over-achievements in comparison. 8- We lose track of our own rhythm and thus get stressed out. Is life good in contrast to everyone else’s success in life on social media? No, it’s shit and we all have to lose by focusing so much on content being thrown at us from the four corners of the globe. It’s insane. Today, in one single day, we access more information than that of a human in his entire life, only 400 years ago. It is crucial to sift and sort, and pick content value which gives us meaning, fulfillment.
Just absorbing information is the surest of ways to burn out our mind and nervous system. It makes for the need to be a specialist in everyone’s eyes. It gives exposure to people who have more resources. It pushes people to become loud speakers, and do crazy things in order to have fame and social recognition. It synchronizes us with the rest of the world and people who we don’t need to be connected to. Is life good in contrast to what you need in this moment in time? Yes, you likely have everything you could possibly need to get to the next step/level in your life and actually thrive. Without the fear of missing out, or trying to keep up with he who is next door. We likely feel more free to make mistakes, and take things slower. Taking things in a slower manner actually makes things go faster, because when we take life slowly it’s more fluid. If we find ourselves constantly pushing against doors that aren’t supposed to open for us, or trying to be better just to keep up with who ever is out there in the world, we lose our foothold and slip. As to progress it is up to us to focus on what we can do on a day to day basis. Though, social media also has advantageous sides to it. We have access to information even if we are cut off. We can learn from a distance focus on inner growth, tend to our wounds and pains from the battlefield. We have time to ponder what exactly will be our next step. We get to prepare, as well as tweak and take a step back from activities we’d be far too involved with if living in environments where the busy pace of life takes over our mind process. It gives us access to specific information. It opens doors to knowledge we would have not had access to otherwise. It gives us opportunities to see what is right and what is wrong in the world as well as synchronise our out of date beliefs and then bring back our perspective to ourselves and see what we think is right or wrong. With so many successful ways to achieve results being exposed to everyone, Is it time to focus on more down to earth qualities such as handmade personalised value? Or do we really need to do anything at all?
What you Need to Know about Social Media
On the one side, being exposed to all things all the time is an amazing source of development, we get to see what we are and by what we are interested.
In other circumstances, we’d have no idea that some things exist. This is a good thing. People also get to exchange and evolve no matter where they are which is helpful.
Discovering many amazing new things, not “feeling” as isolated than as if we had been alone and cut off in a cave the entire time.
It brings great competitivity and progress which comes with competition.
Though on the other, the downsides are felt in part due to the depth at which we are isolated or how “mainstream” we are. And also in part, to one’s degree of confidence or lack there of.
Comparing, which leads us to feeling lesser, unworthy or even unable to live up to “the standard” is a source of pain.
We can never keep up and this turns out to be draining.
No matter how much we share with others, we get nothing in return except confirmation about what we already know. “I’m great”, “I’m powerful”, “I’m rich”, “I’m pretty”… which are vanity criteria based on what we already know.
It also confirms that people who have more financial freedom will be able to show off more, or those who have a standard of beauty which appeals to the masses will be put on a pedestal and valued higher than anyone who is “different” in any way possible.
In a way, its back to high school with the rich kid/poor kid/ Confident kid/Unconfident kid again…
This sense of high school 2.0 is very unproductive for anyone who is observing. Also vain and an empty pursuit due to the fact that it promotes “The popular kids”. It really goes to show the reality of “wanting to fit in”. By wanting to fit in, you naturally aspire to be a product of mass consumption, a product of mass exposure.
Social media also gives the illusion that one is or isn’t necessarily liked based on superficiality.
This is a faulty parameter which cannot give precise and correct results. It bases everything on the Golden Circle but inside out.
Starting with What then how then why. This cannot work; as human beings we function from the inside out, not the outside in.
In terms of effects on our psyche and our time, it is an abomination. Our minds and nervous systems have become overstimulated and over saturated with information that we don’t necessarily need, want or even Should have in the first place.
Over 200 years ago, someones entire lifespan wouldn’t have even half of what we are exposed to in a single day. Imagine what our minds are capable of and what our mental limits are.
Faster, more, better, NOW!
Though, through fomo and needing to know what the “next thing is “social media has exposed us to an attachment to our devices. We needn’t fear governments putting Chips in us to see where we are. We are already here, our information is passed everywhere, all the time, to limits far outside of our reach.
Our minds are saturated, which means are nervous systems are saturated and this is a clear indicator that we need to let go of all outside stimulation, especially devices, screens, and anything which has power.
We are “PUSHING” ourselves to imbibe information which has nothing to do with us. We are exposed to too much information. None which serves us correctly for what is in front of us in actuality.
When traveling in another country, I have found that being confronted to constant New information, my mind is thrilled, though my body has no time to rest as it is constantly adapting to the upcoming change of scenery and people.
The same is valuable for our brains and nervous systems in front of screens. Day in and day out we are exposed to more and more information which never lets us correctly relax and heal our over stimulated sensors. This can be damaging.
The standards around us have risen above what is humanly possible to upkeep. Over consumption has taken part so much that the world and its natural resources are collapsing. The Ice caps Are melting. Our water is filled with plastic. Governments are actually putting nuclear waste into the sea.
Corporations, making mass profit are pushing their agenda onto us based on our social media usage, what we read, what we look at etc. Everything around us has become a product to sell. Everything we see is for sale. Our lives have become studies like labrats for usage and profit.
We are exposed to cultures and trends that have nothing to do with us. We are born in specific parts of the world and for good reason. While growing up in specific places, we have grown to understand and perceive the world around us. The world we see and have action over is what is in front of us, not what is happening half way around the world. This is a disruption in our ways of functioning and takes away our roots, our individuality and unifies everyone with the same styles, trends and exposure which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example: I used to meet people and observe how they spoke, their linguistic rhythms and their mannerisms. Though everyone is now exposed to the same people. This makes everyone into a clone of someone else and empowers those who have more exposure and who have trend influence.
Everything you say and do, there is proof to keep you “consistent”. Though as human beings, we are changeable, we are evolving all the time, we make mistakes, we grow, we change… If there is proof of a mistake, you never get to move on, you never get to change, nor do you ever get to be free from something that hasn’t existed for maybe 15 or 20 years.
Cherokee.blog 