The most Revolutionary thing anyone can do at this point in history is to get off social media. Are we going to? Some are, most, probably not. At least not for now.
So perhaps we simply need to slow down and manage it more effectively.
The fact that we have access to so much information isn’t helping us solve anything really. It’s actually making us both more immune to the conflicts and issues we’re being presented with while simultaneously reinforcing them as something too big to change. The same goes for television, especially if you’re glued to pop media news channels all day. It’s creating a greater sense of meaninglessness in our lives because it increases our sense of helplessness towards what we are seeing.
We need to reclaim our lives from the machine and the only way to do that is by returning to Gaia. To re-hardwire our hearts, brains and bodies to the natural rhythms of the earth. We need to make the changes from the ground up. Being aware of the false systems of control, all of the political jargon, and the destruction around the planet is not granting us any greater sense of power to change things from our computers. Or is it?
I’ve been on social media daily for three years now and what I’ve found from observing people in the lower resolution parts of the web is that they’re dying of boredom. We now have access to all sorts of stimulation in this rabbit hole we call the internet, but even with such a wide range of entertainment and educational material it doesn’t seem like we are becoming smarter or more evolved as a species.
Chronic boredom has become a real thing in our day and age, mostly due to overuse of technology. Chronic boredom creates deep states of depression and leads people straight off the social media cliff into what’s unhealthy.
Applying our valuable web findings and using them to our real life advantage falls into our off-line time. On the grand scale of things, off-line time is decreasing, especially with the younger generations. Even the older generations are falling into the millennial trap of the post-post modern on-line world. More chat, more senseless distractions and being inundated with less and less verifiable facts. All of which depreciates our capacity to act in accordance with our intuition and our ability to discern what’s true verses false. What’s nourishing us verses what harming us.
We’re losing the sacredness of human connection. With the introduction of high speed internet we’ve found solace in our on-line communities and satisfaction in the serotonin kick backs from liked posts. We can find thousands of Face-Weather friends to placate our loneliness, all without having to leave the comfort of our homes and screen time. The only place where no real work is happening to prevent and prepare us for the catastrophes accumulating around the globe. Or is it?
The way in which social media facilitates conversations is optimized for cognitive attention hijacking and limbic system manipulation. Only people who are very good at these types of manipulation are able to use the platform to their advantage. We’re all experiencing this but the majority are not yet aware. Here’s a good article describing how the government is weaponizing it.
Most people don’t have a healthy enough level of sovereignty and so many are simply being sweep away with the various movements and campaigns. It’s highly addictive on top of all that, so without a good sense of self discipline it can lead anyone astray, from your grandmother to your son. Down down into the artificially intelligent rabbit hole we go, often not really consciously choosing in which direction we are forecasting the long term outcomes of our clicks and posts.
It seems as though the more we find comfort on-line, the more we separate ourselves from each other and from what’s fundamentally important in our lives. What’s fundamentally important to future generations.
If we allow social media to stay, we should learn how to use it to our advantage, like really be educated about it. Secondly, we need to get clear on what our intentions are for using it. So if you’re someone who browses endlessly, I urge you to get clear on specific purposes. I diminished my scroll time to one tenth of what it used to be and have become picker about where I go to retrieve the information I’m looking for. At the end of the day it’s too much time spent in aimless scrolling that creates the most damage to our nervous systems and capacity to act as sovereign beings on this planet.
We need an army of peaceful warriors that are willing to self-organize into smaller on-line groups for larger off-line goals. To co-create efficiently without hierarchical organization. Humans naturally do this, we tend to gravitate towards where we are needed the most and understand our role within the group quite effortlessly. If we don’t allow our lower animalistic tendencies to dominate fog our more developed aspects of the brain.
Ought we not use it to our advantage, rather than have it take advantage of us? The issue is that most people still prefer the entertainment value in it, even in the self-help domain. Like how many self-help videos, quotes or memes can we read before not getting fed up with that sort of thing? It makes us lazy in a sense, it simply diminishes our capacity to think clearly about how we are in fact operating within it.
— “There’s two games here, there’s trying to get the best deck chairs on the titanic, and there’s trying to save the ship. In general, nobody can think about how to rescue the ship, it’s a daunting task. So instead we’re fighting for a position in a losing game. It’s important that it stops.” Eric Weinstein
As in the case of the Arab Uprisings, the role of citizen journalism was key. It helped core networks form together to seed the movement. In Syria it’s increasing global awareness of the problems and helping people exercise freedom of speech. I believe some of the reasons why it’s not being used more efficiently in every on-line community, including our beloved spiritual community is that until we reach a critical mass point of pressure there’s no immediate fire up our asses to shake us out of our myopic worlds and start using it intelligently in real group action.