Something Else
It is really easy to take what we have in our lives for granted, even the things that are most important to us. It is so easy to compare ourselves to others, especially in the age of social media; the experiences others are having, the things they have, and where they are in life all make it hard to take a step back, look at your life, and see how much you really have.
This post won’t be bashing social media, in fact the only reason I was able to come to this realization was because of YouTube. But there are some drawbacks that I want to address. Social media is a great tool, it allows people to connect with others and stay in touch with people they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. We can keep up with friends and family and share ideas with people across the world, but it can also be fatiguing.
I am not too heavily involved in social media but even my limited presence has shown me how much people curate what they show on social media. It should seem obvious: people are usually only going to be sharing the good moments. It is easy to forget when you are scrolling through Instagram and every picture is of someone you know or follow on some awesome vacation or having a perfect meal.
It begins to paint the picture that everyone else’s life is so perfect. This can become even more painful if you are also constantly focusing on the negatives in your own life. Maybe you are struggling in your relationship but John and Jane are on vacation and their life seems perfect. What they aren’t going to post on social media is that they are also having relationship problems and they have gone to a counselor every week for the last year. Before I ramble on too much more about this I just want to wrap it up by saying this: don’t let what you see on social media get you discouraged, no one’s life is as perfect as it seems, everyone has ups and downs.
This can be a cause or just exacerbate a feeling of dissatisfaction with our own lives. I hadn’t really thought about it that much until I watched a Kurzgesagt Video about dissatisfaction in our own lives. I highly recommend their videos and if this is a topic you are interested in this is a good starting point. Most of their videos are about science but they have a lot of videos about social issues as well and I will probably reference them a lot in posts that take this form.
The concept that this video introduced me to was gratitude journaling. It became one of the first things that I wanted to do this year. I felt that I lacked a lot of self reflection. I was focusing on the negatives in life and taking what I had for granted. Before you say, “Oh I’m already grateful for things, I don’t need to do that.” I will have to stop you and say it will most likely still be helpful unless you are doing some kind of exercise similar to this already. It isn’t about being ungrateful, but rather taking the time to actively think about and write down the things that you are grateful for.
I wouldn't have described myself as an ungrateful person, although who would, before doing this. If you asked me if I appreciated what I had and was grateful for it before I started this I would have absolutely said yes. That is the biggest argument I have gotten when suggesting this to people. They tell me they are already grateful for what they have and one person even yelled at me for having the audacity to tell them they are ungrateful. It isn’t about that, there is something different that happens in your brain when you take the time to actually reflect and write down the things you are grateful for. It has noticeably increased my satisfaction with life and my general attitude. The video explains it better than I ever could, so I recommend watching that. As they explain, you don’t need a special journal but I do recommend Kurzgesagt’s Journal. It helps guide you through the process and even has informational sections to help explain the process. I am not affiliated to Kurzgesagt in any way, I just really like their content and I want to support them because they are doing good things.
For myself, in particular, it has helped me deal with the feeling of wanting things I can’t have. I had found myself constantly striving for things that were unobtainable. I still sometimes struggle with this but I find when I am doing the journaling more regularly that feeling goes away. I am able to look at my life and see the progress I am making. The journaling also helps put me in a more positive mindset. I find myself looking for the good in things more instead of focusing on the downsides. It is what gave me the positivity to continue doing the blog and podcast, despite not seeing much immediate success.
I am able to look at these projects now and see that I am doing a thing. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, I am enjoying the process. Instead of focusing on the number of viewers and listeners, I can focus on enjoying the process and making what I want to make. My mindset has changed even just over the course of writing this post and it has almost served as a type of gratitude journal itself. I had fallen in the rut of checking how many views my blog was getting and checking how many listeners we had on the podcast every day. But now I realize that isn’t the important part. Would it be nice if this becomes popular? Absolutely, but I am enjoying making it and that is what matters now.
