Monday, March 26, 2018

Zen and the art of online irrelevance.

Looking at my recent drafts on blogger, I realised I was going a bit overboard ranting about a lot of things, people and their behaviour that frustrated me. And I felt unnecessarily irritated with the sudden increase in advertising and aggression on my  social media feeds.

I am an aspirational zen person and till recently, I felt like I was achieving my zen goals. So what went wrong?
Then it struck me: Most of the advertising and content I see on these feeds is in reality targeted towards, and created by people who are younger than I am by at least five to eight years if not more. And while in an ideal scenario I would love to go back to ad-free days with less social media, I can’t without deleting my accounts permanently. I realise that I now possibly fit into the grumpy aunt category (I should ask a young person.) Meanwhile, just the realisation that the ads and the content don’t speak to me and the act of reducing the count of people and topics I actually read about on my social media feeds makes me feel lighter, better, less angry at the world and more zen again. I am being random on purpose so I know that people who I engage with online are really worth engaging with.
Sometimes, personal progress is all about taking a few steps back and being absolutely irrelevant to and on some parts of the internet and the people on it.

No comments: