Are You Happy With How You Spend Your Time?

I will attempt to take the hand of those who need to be led, and not to guide them astray. We’ll go on a path that makes them feel loved, special in the seperation of their individuality, at the same time, learning to come together with a group of like minded individuals, all seeking to uncover that grand prize. An answer to the question, “Who am I, really?”

This question is on the forefront of so many minds. Especially within this highly scrutinous society which we now live. Most are seemingly afraid to take a chance on themselves, for fear of looking like they don’t know what they’re doing. You have to cultivate the ‘stones’ to fall flat on your face, stumble through the darkness to find some form of light, atleast while in the discovery stage.

Here’s a tidbit for you, no one knows what they’re doing, most of their lives. There are eyes everywhere ready to pounce, but those who seek themselves with honesty and earnest effort will always seem like they know what they are doing, against those pretending to have it all together at any given moment.

Everyone has a camera pointed at you, and wants your secrets. Not so they can find out what makes you tick, to help you find the next step in your struggle, it’s usually more the opposite. What they are searching for is a barometer to measure their own lives, to seem comparatively together or rosier. They are looking for the chink in your armour, so they can implament the one-upmanship method, giving themselves kudos for not being as vulnerable in their eyes, as they can paint you out to be. Even if the truth is far from it, and it takes a trick of their mind, and convincing themselves you are beneath them in some way. Maybe it’s envy, maybe it’s jealousy, maybe it’s just that they are desperate for reasurance.

I’ve got news for you though, it’s usually those people who are fixated on whether someone else is or isn’t doing well, they are the ones who desperately need a guiding hand to bring them up from the doldrums of their own inner despair. A despair that they can’t admit they struggle with, or even see within themselves. All I’m saying is, the ones who are hell-bent on criticising you, for being open and honest with yourself about your journey’s hurdles, and your inability to master everything all at once, but willingness to try. Those views are the last you should be listening to for a gauge of how worthwhile a person you are, or how much validity your path has.

Another major sad factor of our society is that, on most days, most people are that type, quick to judge and write you off, and easily swayed by the current flavour of society, the swinging moods of the day. The pressure to join a fad or movement they didn’t know existed yesterday, with their whole heart, just for outside acceptance or approval from strangers. Or just so they don’t stand out as not being ‘with’ the loudest voices for fear of those voices turning against them.

People seem to have lost that stronger sense of “I am me, and this is who I am proud to be”, it just doesn’t seem to show as prevalent anymore. It could be the growing despondency that social media has proliferated. The disease of I.G., F.B., T.T., Twit’, S.C., the list is swelling and the forces they allow us to exert upon one another, indomitable, and the ever present nature of those anti-social social media sites makes life feel stuffy and crowded sometimes. To the point where we forget the true value in waking up each morning and going about our tasks that make life richly rewarding some days. The sense of wanting to escape our own skin, it’s just a sensation we’ve allowed to be created within ourselves, so we can defuse it any time we wish by becoming actively set against it, building the healthy mental fortitude.

We need to rediscover how to breathe and we need to do it with arms wide spread and a big unapologetic smile for the wonders that the real world holds for those who dare to challenge themselves. It may be with new tasks monthly, weekly, daily, and then just all the time. The excitement of fumbling and bumbling through something because it’s the first time you’ve done it. Is the same excitement of knowing that you will be better at that same thing next time you practice it. That is the platinum of life, the nuggets of mystery and effort. These are the moments where we grow the most. Unless you have the memory of a goldfish, getting better at anything you practice regularly is a natural byproduct of your efforts.

The dual level of reward is that in doing these challenging things we are testing ourselves for courage, and checking our breaking or snapping points. We are growing our tolerance for doing hard things and therefor growing the size of reward we recieve after accomplishment of those tasks. Learning to be brave in the face of certain failures, because you know that failure will only happen that way once, if you take notice of the lessons along the way that is. It’s that ability to hold on to the precious lessons we learn that is being diluted in our society. I think it’s partially because we think the phone will tell us later, it has become viewed as useless information, people seem to be losing the stamina for life, and not bothering to retain lessons of value.

That’s where we differ from automatons, we can learn as we go, instead of pressing repeat and relying on the same outcome every time because we’ll do the same things every time, that is not a human trait. How can we learn to walk solidly on both legs if you refuse to relinquish the crutch after breaking your ankle, will you walk on the crutch for the rest of your life? Muscles don’t just reappear, and actions in life that we take toward bettering ourselves and our skills of maturity are the same.

It wasn’t so long ago that phones where there just incase you wanted to talk to someone and the computer was at home in the study. You remember what people did then? They spent time doing things and a lot of the time doing them together. So put the phone on silent and leave it for a couple of hours, take the smart watch off (your heart won’t stop becuase it’s not being monitored). By doing this you are stopping the direct line to your biorhythms from big corporations being able to tell what makes you breath heavier or get sweatier, making you a totally manipulatable tool for them.

Remember that keeping up with some level of visage for strangers, working hard to creat a lie, is using up the one commodity we are all limited in…time. Now, Let the people in your life know, who are also addicted to their phone, that you won’t be using yours for a few hours a day, or even just a couple of days per week, where you are planning to have a five hour hiatus from the phone. Maybe they can visit for a cuppa and a chat, but let them know all the same.

I had an instance where I had someone else being called to my address to check on me becuase my phone wasn’t being answered, and the person calling just couldn’t understand why I wasn’t answering every time someone wanted to draw my attention from my life tasks. After two calls unanswered in the span on one hour they were hysterical. You don’t have to stop yoga and answer the phone, you don’t stop sanding a guitar or cooking in a loud kitchen and answer the phone. You don’t take it on a hike or bike ride where there is no aerial (accept for an emergency number call maybe).

In these breaks, see if you remember how to live without definite reassurance of everything every second, the weather, contact with messages from one stranger to another having nothing to do with you, a new recipe because you walked into the kitchen, an advert selling you a new hair dryer because you mentioned needing more shampoo to your partner, a prompt to contact a tax consultant after a discussion regarding pay levels, it’s relentless and we don’t realise how so, until we put the stop on it and take control back…then you’ll get it, give it a few, but you will.

The anxiety will fade quickly, you’ll be more conscious of the impulse that has been created within you to run and check on other people’s lives via that little demonic device. Suddenly, all that will be replaced by a peace that you forgot you needed to grow for, and within, yourself. The world is just as present or absent, passive or threatening, as it was thirty years ago, but now we have constant distraction from being us, ourselves, honing our sense of love and sense of protecting those we care for, the sense of being present for them while we are in the same physical vicinity as they are, taking lasting memories with your eyes and not a video for later. There is something about the nature of being a slave to these phones, it is stopping us from being present in each moment and that presence is what we need to flourish properly.

It has created a sense of generalised narcissism that everyone is now assuming, not just the conditions of a real narcissist but a thin social veil of narcissism that has become accepted and valued, in that we are all on each other’s stages, each other’s performing monkeys, and there’s now a deeper anxious type of vanity that has taken over from where morals and good sense, and care for one another once resided.

People are losing the ability to just do something for someone else, simply because it felt like the right thing to do in that moment. It has all become a thing of false valour and showmanship, instead of a question of moral thing your gut is promoting within you. Now it’s up to the validity of recordable moments and we are being trained, quite quickly I might add, to take humanity out of our reasons for action. I don’t think there has been such a drastic change for the worse before, not one that has been so widely accepted as normal. I might cop a lot of flack for saying this but I just wish we could incorporate humanity back into the mix somehow. The only way I can see that can happen is to substitute the phone for a handful of hours a few days per week, with our own common sense and abilities to do whatever it is we need done.

These devices have brought a wide range of awesome things of course, the ability to learn anything in a pinch and do what we would once have had to hire someone with the knowledge to do. But we need to find the line where we rely wholly and solely on the internet for our life’s journey, and to create our own experiences. How many people feel like they are living a life they really are not living, simply because they watch and cling to the lives of others who have put theirs on the public stage for daily digestion. How many of us are letting that level of interaction, where we aren’t really interacting with anything or anyone, replace the act of living and doing things for and with ourselves and our loved ones?

Will you let it continue? You can’t just be unaware of something after the mask has been removed so now it’s up to us to create the impetus for action within our own lives and learn to love the living actions we used to know as normal, teaching the younger gen’s how life isn’t to be lived through a screen. We really have become the screen age. I can’t say it’s all bad and sad, it’s different, but we have lost something vital, and we need to coach ourselves back to the values of having real humanity and human instincts from experience, not what we’ve seen people tell us is real.