LINK: MY STRUGGLE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA AND OTHER ESSAYS

All links to High Existence:

My Struggle with Social Media: A Diatribe on Ego and Honesty

…so if I unfriend or ignore you online, I hope you understand. But if you see me go on some friending frenzy you’ll know I found something worth telling the world about. I will have found a banner I can wave that doesn’t read, “Look at me!” Rather, it might read, “Look at us. Poor, sorry, beautiful us.”

A Philosopher’s Guide to Facebook Envy

“It’s a real taboo to mention envy, but if there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy…”

– Alain de Botton

Do you ever feel negative emotions while browsing the web? If you do you’re not alone. A recent study showed 1 in 3 people feel more depressed after visiting social media sites like Facebook. Psychologists call this phenomenon as ‘Facebook envy’.

Best-selling philosopher Alain Botton has pointed out that because Facebook envy is one of the least talked about emotions, it has the power to potentially destroy your life and prevent you from achieving your dreams. To stop this from happening to you, Alain de Botton has invented what he calls the ‘envy diary technique’.

By using the envy diary technique outlined in this post you’ll be able to transform negative emotions like Facebook envy, jealously and frustration into motivation and confidence, allowing you to achieve your goals with more speed and more ease.

The Envy Diary Technique

Whenever you feel envy:

  1. Acknowledge it.
  2. Write down the cause.
  3. Repeat.
  4. Look for a pattern.

Social Media is Distorting Your Creative Vision, and You Don’t Even Know It

What drives your creative work? Money? Fame? Success? If you’re an artist, you’re probably answering “no way”— meaning drives you. Finding purpose or making your life meaningful is your deepest priority, even if it’s not the priority you act on most. (Let’s face it, if living a meaningful life consisted of following an indubitable recipe, we’d all do it. But it doesn’t.)

Whether subtly or profoundly, we all experience this drive for meaning. And though the cause of this drive seems unidentifiable, it’s by searching for it that we add meaning to our lives. Art is just one way we undertake this search. The difficulty, though, with making art is remaining honest, and often our truest desires get supplanted with the desires of others. If you’re struggling to find artistic fulfillment, it may have nothing to do with your skill set or methodology, and everything to do with unquestioned motivations.

For some time now my own work (writing) has felt polluted. I’ve struggled to achieve a sense of honesty, so I recently began exploring why. What I found is an intoxicating ideology and social media as the dominant carrier of it. Together they chloroformed me, stifling my creativity and sapping the pleasure from my work.

REVIEW: A NEW EARTH

A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life's PurposeA New Earth: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’d been noticing this sitting on varying desks in the American Corner of Sofia City Library for a while now and finally decided to give it a try. I must say that it wasn’t as good as The Power of Now, which I loved and want to return to. It could be because this one I read, while The Power of Now I listened to Eckhart Tolle himself reading, which was an experience in its own right. A New Earth was sort of repetitive and nothing really new was introduced, as if Tolle was contractually obliged to write something but couldn’t come up with anything new. But as I’m writing these words I wonder: what new could there be? I suppose the lesson is and will always be the same – though you can play around with the presentation: awareness is all there is, be wary of the ego in yourself and others, meditate. Maybe my criticism is invalid, then, which wouldn’t however change the fact that I didn’t find it as appealing as The Power of Now. But for you, if you read or listened to this one first, it could – for all I know – work the other way around.

These are two of my favourite bits:

“The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.”

“Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s land between two world’s. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purposes have not merged.”

I thought the cover was beautiful too. Here’s something similar I stumbled upon on Tumblr yesterday. Click on the pic for the post.


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