Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s fine. It’s not their journey to make sense of. It’s yours.
Author | Photographer | CG Artist | Filmmaker
The moment you begin liking or commenting on people’s posts on social media as an agreed-upon exchange of ‘value’ is the moment you are no longer being genuine. Once you start liking someone’s content without regard to whether you actually like it or not – because they’ve agreed to do the same for you – is the moment you become a servant to social media.
While everyone wants to feel like what they have to offer is of value, entering into agreements where you will engage with other people’s posts if they engage with yours means that the engagement is no longer prompted by the value something offers, but instead by the value you hope to get in exchange for your engagement.
Social media is already an unfair system – which is why people seek to find ways to outwit it – and, generally speaking, it’s foolish to think that changing your behavior to manipulate a system in your favor is something that hasn’t already been accounted for. Especially when social media is made up of millions of people just like you who are seeking ways benefit from it. With enough data, your response to your experience on social media becomes predictable.
Every action you perform on social media – and many that you perform on your phone or in your computer browser – are tracked and analyzed. And have been since you joined their system. This is not done for your benefit, but for theirs. Again, with enough data, your behavior becomes predictable – especially when collated with the data of millions (or billions) of other people.
Social media companies are like casinos, they exist to make money and the systems that allow them to do so are forever slanted in their favor. The more a company can manipulate people into changing their behavior, the more predictable people become and the more money a company can make.
If you’ve fallen into a pattern of changing your behavior on social media from what was once authentic & natural to something that is inauthentic & calculated in order to manipulate social media to work for you, understand that this behavior has already been accounted for and the only thing truly being manipulated is you.
Ask almost any person who’s single and they’ll likely tell you they love the idea that their soulmate is out there actively searching the world for them.
But show up in their town as the person doing the searching and the most likely scenario is rejection of the person and the idea. People want the “fairy tale”, but are also quick to reject it.
This is a case where people’s attitudes & beliefs have a direct impact on the outcome of their experience. You can’t have the fairy tale while rejecting it as a possibility at the same time.
It’s good to be careful, but cynicism, pessimism, and baggage often do very little good when it comes to building a better future.
Be careful of keeping yourself from things that you want because your attitude and outlook are not congruent with getting them.
While labels can be targets to strive for, more often than not, labels are limits. People define the boundaries of their lives and what they are capable of achieving by the labels they give themselves and those they choose to conform to their lives to.
Before you apply a label to any aspect of your life, make sure you’re not adopting it as a means to excuse yourself from personal growth, working on yourself, or doing as much as you are capable of doing in life.
We live in a world where people look, but don’t see. Hear, but don’t listen. Experience, but don’t learn. And are given warnings, but ignore them.
Just because something has been expressed before by someone else in one way or another – and nearly everything has – it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth repeating.
Sometimes it isn’t just the message that matters, it’s the messenger.
When it comes to productivity & accomplishment, too many people spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing. Your thoughts produce far fewer results than your actions ever do.
The world doesn’t see what you think, it only sees what you do. If you want to make a significant difference in your own life or someone else’s, you must transform your thoughts into actions that get results.
