October 28, 2016
Devilish Decadence & Digital Addiction:
Fantasies versus Experiences
Scroll through Facebook. I see people sharing short videos that resemble an ADD-friendly cooking show, where they introduce and show you how to make a recipe in less than a minute. I believe the same is true between these clips and those cooking shows I saw in the 90s growing up, it is rare that somebody actually makes them to completion. Now I'm not ragging on the videos, just the folks who share them.
I believe we have an addiction to fantastical ideas, recipes, and experiences, however, our weakness is that we never actually go out to live and bring them to reality. Perhaps there is this fear that our experience won't be as grand as the content on our social media feeds depicts it. Perhaps we won't be able to give an account appropriate of the true experience. Perhaps as a younger and less experienced generation, we want to seem to our peers that we are actually worldly. Perhaps to some of you the fantasy is just as good as the real thing, that share button grants you a brief pleasure and a lasting enjoyment for up to 48 hours after the share.
Facebook Fantasies are a devilish decadence. They're not good for you, it's a self-indulgence into how good you are as a person or how admirable you are because your aspirations are sky high. Aspirations and to-do lists don't count, it's about as good as counting a "close to the rim shot" in basketball. Real things count. To actually live your life is the real challenge. So many times we go somewhere to do something or live out an adventure and we forget to relish the moment. If you forget to take pictures and forget to share on social media, then you are really in the moment and living it up with what's physically around you.
Reposting anything that someone else creates is almost like making yourself out of paper mache, it's taking bits and pieces of everyone else adding some goop and creating a hollow person. Take those words beyond the surface value, figure out what they mean besides adding some magical meaning to your life for a few minutes. Stop sharing videos of recipe making with ADD or videos of some far away place that you can't necessarily afford to go to. Live in your own life, after all you are your own you.
Of course this is all hypocritical, I'm writing on a digital platform about life how to live it and then I'm going to post this article on Facebook, Twitter, and maybe LinkedIn. Perhaps I want self-gratification, perhaps I want to share my idea, perhaps I want to offend people. Does it really matter what I want to do? It matters that you're reading this. What matters next is what you will do after you finish reading this.
Following this I'm going to go work my 9-to-5 job, I'll listen to Podcasts in the car, I'll add things to my boards in Pinterest, I'll retweet motivational shit, and I'll like anything on Facebook that makes me happy for myself or someone else. It's a part of my ordinary routine. I'm also going to continue to write blog posts on QuintessentialVoyage, I'm going to set dates and make plans to live deliberately in the wilderness, I'll go into the gym and fight gravity by lifting heavy weights, I'm going to challenge the status quo and make myself my own foe. It's all a balance of your original content, your magnificent life, influences of digital world, experiences of the real world, and making it all into something worth sharing with other people in the world.
What will you create? What can you share worthwhile?
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