It’s liberating to break any habit.
Eating what you should eat, sleeping when you should sleep, correcting your own course out of nothing but pure will.
But no habit is worse than lying to yourself.
One dirty little lie we’ve learned to tell ourselves the second someone leaves the room, or there’s a break in conversation.
“I should check my phone quickly”.
Not a moment passes before we’re on Instagram or Snapchat, convincing ourselves that this is somehow making better use of our time than sitting in thought, absorbing our surroundings or reflecting on moments passed.
But perhaps we’re giving these software developers far too much credit, and far too much time.
Cumulatively hours of the day, days of the week, weeks of the month – we swap life for less.
We consume a distorted world, many of us adding to the ecosystem.
“I don’t want people to forget about me” we say, too rarely, and think too often.
Our pseudo-souls are paraded in vogue. Veiled in perfection. Saturated and structured.
Chaos is cropped and recoloured. Aligned and straightened. Bystanders blurred and our iris enhanced.
We believe for a moment that we’re the centre of each of these 6 billion universes.
Defending and rationalising our actions to protect our vision of a precious ecosystem.
In reality, we’re being ruled by a bible of code written on fold-out tables by ironic t-shirt tragics in the chic lounge rooms of Silicon Valley.
We use the word viral but maybe we’re blaming the wrong bug.
Addiction to attention is as the most contagious plague we’ve known.
It causes us to sneeze out our otherwise private moments only to have them swiped up and off-screen like the smudge they are.
But how does it end? Are we not embarrassed yet?
We’ve all been guilty of sharing too much on social media. Be it born of pride, jealousy, spite, insecurity, grief or loneliness.
Regardless of the wound we’re attempting to heal, why do we turn to the public for attention?
The public. Not the private. Not the people who have crouched beside us in the trenches.
We hurt but we keep quiet. We don’t process and communicate. We don’t speak up.
We feel transparent and yearn for opaque. Our logic grows flaws.
A hundred brushes paint in the blank-paged validation faster that one.
But not all bristles are equal.
All of a sudden we’re overexposed, naked. Bleeding out our emotions, our plans and our dreams.
The majority of “content” on social media serves no considered value or purpose.
“I’m just posting this one for me, no one else.”
We lie to ourselves under the guise of inspiring others as we blatantly frame up a facade of a lifestyle which we might have achieved had we not spent these precious moments removing real life from the shot.
Our lives lived behind lenses, staging all of our memories and cropping out reality.
I regret wasting a single productivity-rich minute telling people what I wanted to do, where I wished I was or the places I dreamed of visiting. Get back to work, Dan, and make it happen.
Ambition isn’t impressive in and of itself, imagination without action is as vacant as a vacuum.
By some stroke of luck – no skill, smarts or training – with nothing but isolation at my side, I no longer seek to impress anyone else. Gratefully fateful to care not about ever-presence in the minds of people I don’t know the names of. I have no special trick or trait, no words of wisdom to share. But I sincerely wish I could share with others the fortune of this lost dependence.
All I can share are these thoughts that have followed, the reflections mentioned above. I take no credit for these new perspectives as I didn’t seek them out intentionally. Perhaps just the right mix of random thoughts encountered, and at the right times.
What it may have ultimately come down to was a reaslisation that nobody cares – and how wonderful that is. When mistakes are made, we become our worst disciplinarians.
More importantly, if you can’t pat yourself on the back, perhaps no one else should. The value of achievement is in the knowledge of its sacrifice.
I could be your best friend, your parent or your Princess Polly secret diary but I still won’t know the full extent of what it’s taken you to get as far as you have. No one does and no one ever will. No one except you.
If you’ve ever been celebrated for a win that came easy to you, you know the bitter antithesis of this concept.
And when you do smash that next goal, everyone will still congratulate you, just like they always have.
But no one will have any idea of the adversity you’ve persevered through or personal struggles and circumstances you overcame.
No one else felt that chest-gripping hesitation before you started, or faced the distractions you ignored and hard decisions you made just to take that first step. No one truly knows of all the sacrifices, lost hours of sleep or foregone down-time; or the abandoned comforts you could have had as yet another unambitious lump of wooly mediocrity in a sea of sheep.
Don’t set out to impress people. Not your friends, not your family and not your followers. Yes, they’ll all admire and respect you for what little they can appreciate and understand, but that’s nothing compared to the pride and self-respect of which you’re capable having experienced the whole journey first-hand.
Nothing is more valuable than earning that pat on the back from yourself.
Set out to do one thing: Impress yourself.
Take a risk no one else will know about. Learn something new just for yourself. Create something that makes you proud and keep it private. Finish your next project without telling anyone or complaining about how hard it was. You already know how hard it was, and only your opinion matters.
Focus on demonstrating your own value to yourself and you’ll be working on your next goal before you even think about telling anyone how you crushed the last one.
Now, it’s time to get back to work.