All The Lonely People

The other day I tweeted the above and also posted it to Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn. 

Ironically I got responses from a lot of FB friends (one of whom also responded on Twitter)! More ironically, I used a Tweet so couldn't say everything I wanted, which was that Facebook strikes me as being a lonely place for many.

The desire to share is huge, but nobody has time to read everything everybody shares. I often see on friends' pages that they've shared stuff nobody has responded to. I know that for some, social media is a primary source of connection and for others it isn't, but still it's hard for me to believe that anybody shares anything without wanting it to lead to a connection of some sort. 

Maybe I'm wrong about that, though. Maybe it's just what I want. I guess I won't know until I ask people individually.

Facebook makes choices for us as to who we see on our pages. It can make you forget that others exist. And it only has buttons for support. What if I post something and you don't like it? You don't respond, so I think you've forgotten me. The logic seems right, but it actually isn't; non response can just be the result of algorithm control. Me, I prefer somebody to disagree than say nothing, but you might not be the same, so there's no way to connect.

It's a strange world, Facebook. Twitter can feel more immediate because you can find specific conversations with hashtags and join in. So if you have an interest, say, in politics you can find others with the same.

For me, Facebook takes more effort at conscious participation. Ultimately, real relationships take work, don't they? Social media ease of access doesn't save one from that.

Find me on Twitter and Facebook 

Facebook, Twitter, Apple et al - Helping us Make a Better Connection? Really?

It’s a world of instant gratification, where we’ve all been massively conditioned by a constant barrage of advertising and new, better, bigger – well, actually smaller – products every few months. A world where we’re all racing to save time and make more money to pay for all these new necessities. Or working way too hard for not enough money so the person or company we’re working for can buy whatever they want. If we’re in that scenario we’re imprisoned by our own prejudices against ourselves – that we don’t deserve anything better – and by a pretty generally accepted idea that’s it our fault we’re not more empowered.

Time is money but there isn’t enough of the former, ergo never enough of the latter. We’ve been taught with Machiavellian cleverness and in ways that we’re not even aware of that social media keeps us connected but in fact it keeps us distracted, uses up that precious time and leaves us starved for something real. Because the connections we make are long distance but immediate, often with shorter and shorter sentences composed of horribly distorted and truncated words.

Our minds are deluged with information that’s outrageously seductive and feels fulfilling but only for a few seconds. Then we need more. It’s not the real stuff of connection and fulfilment, it’s a drug and dangerously addictive.

We are the slaves of Apple, Facebook, Twitter et al. Devices get smaller and smaller and we use less and less of our physical capacity. Hunched over a tiny screen, using tiny movements of thumbs. Body tense. Eyes straining to see the print.There’s nothing pleasurable about it and nothing intrinsically good about lousy grammar and small, but we don’t question, we just buy, buy, buy and use, use, use. Or feel left out, left behind if we can’t afford to keep up.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that all this information, all these new and better products, this fast-paced life, is giving us more and more, making our world bigger and bigger.

It isn’t, though. It’s imploding in the places it matters the most. Our capacity to express creatively and originally. To really think for ourselves. To realize that the worthwhile things in life take time and space to develop, and that it’s the journey which brings fulfilment not the immediate achievement or gratification.

And what about our capacity to connect in a meaningful way face to face? Either we don’t have time, or we’re hooked on social media, which has made cowards of us all. We throw words and images out into cyberspace hoping somebody will like them and leave some kind of cryptic comment. But if they don’t, hey, we’ve moved on to something else anyway so we don’t care. There’s no risk-taking and very little reward, so it leaves us overstimulated and understroked; dessicated at a deeper level. With an overactive brain and an aching heart.

It's not hard to imagine where this could end up. A world where, even face to face, everybody’s desperate to be heard by a living, touchable human being – to have that real experience without which none of us can survive in those places it matters the most. So desperate that everybody talks but nobody listens.

Zuckerberg and Facebook; a Tale of Ingenuity, Vision, Power and Greed

The story of Facebook is more and more looking like a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Once upon a time a country was created out of virtually nothing by an idealistic young man who thought it would be a good idea if friends could meet up in cyberspace and share their lives.  Share their friends, even, meet new people. Everything was rosy as first. His subjects didn’t realize they were his subjects at all, and they got free connection to all their friends. Fun was had by all in this land of plenty. 

But of course the creator realized he could make money out of it – and who could blame him? Even creators have to live. He was clever about it, and money started to flow as the country grew beyond even his wildest dreams. Soon it had a gigantic monthly population – close to a billion, or so its PR machine said.

But by then the beauty of the original dream had begun to significantly dim as the money and the power went to the creator’s head. World dominance is a seductive thing, so is a giant bank account, and who doesn’t dream of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange? But the subjects realized this country wasn’t any longer so much about connecting friends, it was about how to use friends – anybody’s friends - to sell something, or shove something down your throat, whether you wanted to hear about it or not.

And it sure wasn’t free at all, they paid with their privacy. The homepages got busier and busier, with targeted ads, whether you wanted them or not. Imposters flourished because there was inadequate security; the country became a breeding ground for exploitation. 

And those figures of almost a billion daily users a month – convenient for drawing advertisers and thus investors - well, they turned out not to be totally provable, as anybody can have as many accounts as they want and the creator hadn’t set up a monitoring system. Strange, considering how creative he was. You’d think he’d have known how to put that in place. There was no system to differentiate between real, active users and automatic updates happening, either.

Apart from that, subjects began to be disillusioned, and the exponential growth of the country began to slip. Rumors abounded about the creator once saying at college that anybody who trusted him with their personal information was a “dumb fuck”. And a film was made about a young kid in college who he allegedly stole the idea from in the first place. Who in real life he paid out millions in a settlement. 

One subject allegedly said of him that he “…turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist." (Wiki) Well, that subject won a Golden Globes best screenplay award for the abovementioned film, so perhaps a little bias is understandable. Perhaps he really meant it, even though his script portrayed the creator in not such a great light. Hindsight is easy when you’re clutching an award. But other subjects were saddened at the loss of the real opportunity for the creator, to make plenty money for himself, as he deserved for his ingenuity, but never to lose sight of his original goal, that this would be about friends connecting, and thus to become an icon for his generation and generations to come in a world where exploitation is so easy. To be happy with some money and not want to dominate the world. 

The story doesn’t have an ending yet. But the moral – a kind of double-edged thing - is pretty clear. Power corrupts, and people don’t like being exploited. You can’t start something with a philanthropic idea and, when it attracts millions because of its inherent philanthropy, turn it into something where you use everybody, and think that people aren’t going to notice and object. We’re not all dumb fucks.

For other opinions, read Janet Tavakoli at the huffingtonpost.com, and Somini Sengupta at nytimes.com.

Connecticut Shooting – Without Love & Connection We Fragment

Last night I watched various anchors and reporters talking about the terrible shooting in Connecticut.  I was struck by the puzzlement that it had happened, and how much at a loss many were to explain the why of it. A neighbor was interviewed and she said the shooter had seemed a normal young man, and so had his mother. Nobody noticed anything amiss. 

But looking at her I saw a kind of inner dessication from emotional deprivation. Her comment made me think of how often people commit suicide and families and friends say afterwards that there were no signs of distress. I never believe that. I think we’ve either lost or we’ve never developed the capacity to see the reality of a person through the mask that our society teaches us to develop. 

The mask that families, friends and communities require us to keep in place, because who the hell really wants to hear? When you’re happy the world smiles with you. When you’re depressed or sad or scared everybody scatters or tries to force upon you the importance of a positive attitude. The tension that builds up inside gets unbearable, and eventually something pops. 

One of the anchors commented on the possibility that the young man was depressed and added “it may seem surprising that a depressed person would do something this violent”. I stared, flabbergasted. Depressed people are the ones who pop; doesn’t everybody know that? People get depressed because they’re not getting the love and respect they need. It’s that simple.

Nobody sees them and they’re forced in all sorts of ways to suppress their needs even more and over-adapt. Which is anathema to the spirit; we’re not built to suppress and be deprived, we’re built to experience love and connection and express ourselves creatively. A young man whose mother doesn’t have a clue about unconditional love has learnt from birth that he has no value. He hasn’t developed social skills so he can’t get the love he needs from community.

The mistake we make too often is in thinking that if children are ‘well behaved’ it means they’re happy. Ditto adults. Often they’re only that way because it’s the only way they’ll either get positive attention from us or avoid abuse. As a society it hasn’t sunk in yet how violent the anger is of the unheard child and how we store it well into adulthood. The kind of violence that is as powerful as the instinct to kill if your life is being threatened.

When the need for love continues to be ignored and the ange gets suppressed time after time after time, the result is depression. You don’t fix depression with positive thinking. You don’t fix it with medication either. You numb the symptoms is all. The emotions, which are the result of the non-nurturing environment you live in, keep on building, you just don’t know it. Some part of you carries on feeling beyond your awareness. 

If the need for love and touch and connection and to just be heard, is strong enough, the pain of being constantly discounted can become so unendurable that it breaks through your anaesthesia, whether it’s medication or distraction-induced. If you have no social skills, no understanding of what’s happening to and within you; if you’ve never had positive loving input, you have no frame of reference about moderate behaviour.

The moderating part of your brain hasn’t been developed at all. So when the pain reaches that intensity, you’re in fight or flight mode. In your world, your perception, the information you run off in your head, you have only one option. If you’ve been exposed to way too much killing in your entertainment, and guns are easy to get, why on earth would you choose any other outlet?   

“Give me liberty or give me death.” How often do shooters massacre others then turn the gun on themselves?  Incidents like this take us by surprise only because we don’t have an accurate idea on how massive our need for real, unconditional love is. And how not getting it violates us and presses that survival button in a way that no amount of suppression and unhealthy social conditioning can do anything about.  

We look on this young man and think he’s a mutant of our society. But is he? I don’t think so. I think he’s the ultimate illustration of how lousy we are at facing our inner reality, how much we do everything we can to avoid our needs, how vulnerable we actually are, how good we are at over-adapting in ways that often make life unbearable for us at some level. And how much pressure we put on those around us to do the same.

Life is hard, its lessons heart-wrenching. Innocent children and beautiful-spirited adults who had so much love to give, so much life to experience, have paid for society’s unconsciousness. May those who died rest in peace. May those who survived find the love and support they need. May we all work towards being more truthful about what we really need, and wake up to how desperate some people around us are for love.

Exploiting Relationships For Profit - Facebook's Blunder?

I’ve been watching the Facebook saga with quite a lot of interest.  Somehow the giant prodigy just doesn’t seem like a winner any more.  Perhaps I’ve been influenced by all the hype around its lack of success on the stock market so far, but I think there's more to my sense that fundamentally something's wrong.

It seems to me that its power grew because it was originally about people connecting, with no money involved.  So it was all about the heart.  The foundation was solid.  But now all the advertising and intrusion into privacy, and the extent to which people use it to promote business has changed it into something completely different.  So different in fact that it’s primary purpose isn’t related much to its original one, which created the foundation.  The giant has become weakened.

It's one thing connecting with your friends to say hi and keep in touch, share stuff, and ask a favor.  I think asking is fine.  It’s challenging, but there’s nothing wrong with it.  If you need, you have to ask, and if people get annoyed or judge you for it, then that’s the reality of your relationship, and it might as well be out in the open so you can both move on.

But it's another thing to actively market products to your friends on a consistent basis.  I don’t mean it in a moral sense, that it’s bad, because I don’t think it is.  It’s just it doesn’t work after a while!  It doesn’t work with me!  Good case in point is the Borowitz Report, which I absolute love – it’s intelligent satire - hilarious and insightful.  So I subscribed to it.  Now I get an email every day.  I read probably one a week, maybe not even that much.

But what really brought all this home to me was the blog I started, to promote or at least tie in with an ebook I wrote.  Every day I posted something, and I followed somebody’s advice to automatically feed it to my Facebook page.  I didn’t think it through.  Then I started tweeting, and I connected that to my Facebook as well.  Not so long ago I realized that my Facebook friends are getting inundated with tweets and posts that aren’t related to our relationship at all!

I was actively marketing to my friends, and – which is most important when it comes to marketing – ignoring the fact that none of them are interested in my damn book!!  Gaaahhhh.  So I’ve got some choices: I must seek another market for my book, and I must either have more variety on my blog, or I must disconnect the automatic feeds between my Facebook and my blog and my  twitter account.  If I want to share something I’ll do it manually.

How many times have people said “don’t mix business with friendship”?  It’s not a cliché for nothing.  Facebook encourages you to do the mixing, but I wonder if it isn’t paying the price.  If the majority of people were drawn to it because it was a place where you could get away from advertising, and it was about real connection and not money, how can it sustain itself when the culture has become about exploiting connection for profit?

Hmmm, I think I'll share this page!

To read a sample of or buy my ebook Make The Connection: And What About Me? on how to be real love and be loved and be the boss of your own life, Click here or go to Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble Nook 

 

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