SOCIAL ‘MADIA’
Ok, so part of promoting my book, ‘Wake Up - What are your emotions really telling you?’, and to reach the ‘modern’ world, required that I raised my online profile. And ‘online’ means, in the main, social media. Now writing is a pretty solitary pursuit. Just you, a keyboard, a blank screen (for much of the time). Until you start to tug the end of the ball of string and, with luck, the flow starts and you get a maybe a good few hundred words down that hopefully make some sense….
So when it comes to publicity and self promotion, when the book is done, you have to quickly change tac and start to package and promote yourself. Put yourself out there in a way that grabs attention and gets your noticed.
Having written a book about the destructive power of the unchecked ego, the idea of unashamed self promotion seemed to go a little against my literary aspirations! But it got me thinking, as I trawled the newsfeed, timelines, tweets and hashtags of friends, family and associates. Despite the multitude of platforms and arenas that are open to us all to ‘self promote’, how narrowly we still choose to define ourselves in today’s world. Can a posed, flawless, contrived image really capture who we are, our essence?
One of my favourite quotes in my book, and one which I think sums up the major message of its contents, is by David Viscott, American psychiatrist and popular radio talk show counsellor:
“The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”
Many of the counselling client case studies I include refer to the human struggles that we face as life seems to challenge us to develop our ‘spiritual muscle’. The muscle that, if we work out enough, can help us to reach deep inside ourselves to grasp the unique precious gift within.
Yet, in the constant comparing, contrasting and competition of the social media world, how does this help us to honour and celebrate our uniqueness? With all the pressure to ‘keep up’ with the unattainable delights of everyone else’s life, how much time do we take to compare ourselves with…… ourselves? I’m reminded here of the timeless adage: ‘At the end of the day you are only in competition with yourself!’
This got me thinking about the voyeur addictive nature of our ego that loves to look in on what others are doing. Are they having a better time than me? Are they ageing better than me? Have they got more friends? Do they go to more places than I do?
It probably explains why we are a nation, a world even, of ‘soap opera’ and celebrity ogling fanatics. Are our own lives really that mundane? Our own gifts that uninspiring?
All the time we waste time comparing and contrasting are precious moments we could spend creating or discovering. I know the slightly empty feeling I’m left with if I ‘binge’ scroll down my timeline and wonder why I’m not having half the fun that the rest of the world seems to be having…. particularly during these trying months of lockdown!
The only true validation, the only worthy validation, is validation of the self. That holding, that honouring, that respecting of ourselves that can only really occur when we unplug ourselves from the matrix of the net and do something that nourishes our soul.
I’m going to commit to spending less time on social media. And when I do go on I want to make it more personally productive for me. To spend less time deciding how to best live my life by looking at others. Social ‘madia’ can make you go a bit crazy, particularly when we’ve had to spend so much time away from ‘normal’ life during this unprecedented year. The real world is having real contact with real people who want to know about you and not your ‘on screen’ alter ego. And if we can’t always currently enjoy that because of the social distancing restrictions, then we need to use the online world to its highest spiritual potential: To communicate and not contaminate. To connect and not impress. To nurture our uniqueness and not negate our potential: “What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.” Rumi.
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