On Social Media

This post was from some old notes I found about my own personal reflections regarding the negative side of using social media for me and my associated thoughts in response to it.

This one was taken after coming back from running around on the rocks which I love to do, but was spoilt when I attempted to recapture the moment for SM.

They can sound a bit sombre, but they are just reflections – cathartic moments –  and good for me to revise to see if I’ve learnt anything or whether I’m still slipping into old behaviours so I can do something about it.

These reflections are apparent I think, for many people, and the evidence is clear to see that something is missing, or at least, often at times, being taken away with the use social media by individuals.

Marcus Aurelius

“Everything in any way beautiful has its beauty of itself, inherent and self-sufficient: praise is no part of it. At any rate, praise does not make anything better or worse. This applies even to the popular conception of beauty, as in material things or works of art. So does the truly beautiful need anything beyond itself? No more than law, no more than truth, no more than kindness or integrity. Which of these things derives its beauty from praise, or withers under criticism? Does an emerald lose its quality if it is not praised? And what of gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a dagger, a flower, a bush?”

NOTE 1 – Rockhopper

So natural, so fluent, so inline, so focused and in the moment until I’m concerned about what others think.

The desire to reconstruct the flow, to get accolade for whats both brilliant and at the same time insignificant in its normality.

So staged, so false, so contrived just to be externally validated.

I stop. I talk to the rocks to realign myself.

 

They say, ‘pay attention, be present.

Watch, feel listen, move, understand, stop, enjoy. Tune in.

Listen again to how that feels’.

Like taking a rose and painting it.

 

It’s artificial and it feels like it is.

What I am doing is perfect…..until I try to film it or photograph it. Then it’s not good enough, not extreme enough.

And half the time it never was, but it was enough until I cared what I thought the world wanted to see.

As soon as the camera comes out and the photos are taken, only then is it not good enough.

Very sad.

As I edit the film. It’s a split second in time that I’m hunting for – the perfect shot.

The illusion of what I want to see.

Of what I want to project.

But its not the truth.

A single shot or even a video can’t capture how I feel in the moment.

As a shot, it’s not good enough to impress.

It’s a 2 dimensional image that can never convey my senses, my emotion, my focus or my presence in that moment.

How I felt in the moments when I’ve made that committed move that took 10 or more minutes to pluck up the courage to execute – ‘the move of no return’.

If I could show that it would always be enough regardless of how it looked.

I spoil my reality when I try to create a false one for approval.

Others opinions eventually spoils our own opinion.

And yet to watch the movement, to be able to do the movement in and of itself, unobserved and simply lived, is where the perfection lies, and we miss it because we are looking in the wrong place rather than where we are.

We spend all our time trying to choreograph, angle, retake and freeze frame what are often banal and everyday moments to give the outside world an impression we have it sorted.

The unhappiness that social media so insidiously brings is that we do not feel, that who we are or what we are doing is enough in real life.

Sometimes it’s more than enough and often the real truth is that what we are doing is not anywhere near our full potential. We are lazy.

It’s much easier to create an image that portrays us doing something that in reality takes a lot of work to actually do.

A handstand takes a long time to master, but if we video us attempting one, but falling straight over, one of those frames will still look as though we have it mastered. And thats the one we show.

We can cut and post that with a snappy ‘living my best life’ quote or some other banal, throw away meaningless line attached and wait for the accolades.

This is why we feel shit. Because we are not stupid. We know it’s our bullshit that’s being liked.

If we want to feel good we need to do the work.

We need to put the graft in. We need to feel as though we have earned it.

We need to know it’s who we are, not what we are using to cover up who we believe we really are.

It’s the same as my nephews getting awards every week for learning their times table, but when quizzed a week later cannot pay the piper.

They know nothing.

It’s an illusion.

A momentary memory trick.

A linear hoax.

The awards start to mean nothing, so we crave for more praise whilst doing less and less for it.

This is where we are getting it all wrong.

We want more for doing less, but getting something for nothing never builds our sense of self-worth.

We need to feel useful. To have a purpose. An identity. A sense of achievement out of what we have produced rather than what we have received.

What we get, should be simply a bi product of what we have done.

Praise without merit never feeds the soul.

The material trimmings attained from selling out never brings the sense of fulfilment and contentment that doing something based on who we really are brings.

Sometimes we go to the masses on Instagram for them to tell us something different from what we already know.

We are often just lazy bastards. We are not working hard enough.

What we are doing is average, everyday mundane bullshit.

We are not celebrities, pop stars or the Kardashians.

We are mainly living out quiet lives of desperation and instead of acknowledging and exploring, we take the easy route and attempt to lie to ourselves by creating an artificial world of what we want and wish we were and project it onto the screen as though its somehow real.

But we are not inside social media.

We are outside of it.

We observe it.

We look at who we are, or appear to be and we know it’s not real.

We look in the mirror and we know we don’t believe we are the person we see on our profile.

The one who is the best of a 100 photo retakes of the person who we know we really are.

The one that we delete over and over again until we get that one that we think looks like the person we want to be.

Ironically is an illusion of someone looking like and doing something, that in reality, we never where.

But still we attempt to lie to ourselves through the ‘likes’ of people who were not even there, or where ever there and do not know us, but assume we are the person we wish we were, doing the things we wish we were, or even capable of.

Our SM likes are based on who we wish we were rather than who we are.

We are not liked for who we are but who we are pretending to be.

We know its bullshit. We know we are lying to people we are asking to like us, to trust us and to support us.

It’s this incongruence that gnaws away at our conscience and self esteem.

But we have a choice how we use SM. We don’t have to give it up entirely.

We just need to be more aware of who is the slave and who is its master.