You already matter

There’s a reason I haven’t been on Facebook much lately, and when I think about why I can only explain it as … it makes me sad to see so many people trying to prove their worth and relevance to other people, constantly.  I mean, I guess it comes down to that.  I’ll be the first to admit I love sharing pictures and videos of what I’m up to, and all that, but I just get this overwhelming sense of sadness when I see how badly some people need approval from other people who don’t actually mean… anything … in their lives.  I mean, really … they mean, literally, nothing.  Nothing except a “thumbs up” in the form of a “like”.  If that’s all it takes to make a person feel good about themselves, I don’t know how else to express my chagrin other than to say I need to back away from the culture for a bit.  There’s ‘sharing’, and there’s ‘oversharing’, and I don’t mean that in the ‘oversharing’ kind of way you may be familiar with. The more selfies you post of yourself, the more insecure I find you.  I know I’ve written about it in another blog entry, but that’s just one of those things that makes me feel for the person posting the selfies.  I want to know what they’re missing out of life, and I want to hope that void can’t be filled by a bunch of people hitting “like” and telling them how beautiful or handsome they are when they post one.  Of course they look great.  No one’s going to post a selfie of themselves right after they woke up in the morning.  They aren’t going to be posting selfies of themselves doing something they find mundane and not at all ‘meaningful’ in a ‘Facebook Prestige’ kind of way.  None of us are likely to see a selfie taken by someone while they’re completely miffed at another person they’re in the middle of arguing with or crying because of… so yeah… “you look great!”. Of course you look great.  Take a selfie every now and again, but please spare us another selfie of you sitting in your car, or of you with pouty duck lips because you’re sure most of the people who see it will find you as adorable as you find yourself.  Goodness. And please, stop with the bathroom mirror selfie shots.  Heck, any mirror selfie shots.  It screams ‘insecurity’ and it pains me to see that people feel their own self worth is such a sore spot for themselves that constant reassurance from others is what gets them through the day.  I want to believe that everyone I know is happy with who they are, and happy with their lives, and happy with their experiences within it.  So, I guess what I’d like to say to anyone who’s a Facebook or Instagram junkie… “you already matter”.  You don’t need these exceptionally superficial platforms to tell you who you are.  You already know who you are, and if that’s not good enough for you, then nothing you post on any of these types of platforms will make that right for you.  Nothing.  Doesn’t matter what it is.  If you aren’t enough for you, no one else’s approval will make you good enough for yourself.  I don’t have any words of wisdom on how you find yourself, but if you can’t go a month without posting something on a social media site, then you probably have a problem with more than just “I post too much on social media”.  And the wholeness you’re looking for… longing for … can’t be found there.  Where can it be found?  I have no idea.  Everyone’s different. Find your own personal wholeness in real life interactions wherever your inner voice tells you to.

Mostly, though, this blog posting was prompted by a recurring theme I’ve found myself running into on the internet lately.  It has nothing to do with social media and everything to do with people who hold spiritual classes, or write books, or who conduct courses, on subjects pertaining to spirituality, and “teaching others how to better their lives”.  They dress nice, they speak fluently and with educated vocabularies, and some even have nice titles and impressive academic degrees, and occupations in fields that require intense amounts of study.  But the truth of the matter is, these people are flawed and lost as the ones seeking their direction. The worst of it is, many of these ‘leaders’ are so ego driven they border on the edge of ‘fraud’. I say “border” because I want to believe (and for the most part, I do believe) they aren’t fully aware of the depths of their own flaws because their ego won’t allow them to see themselves in that way.  For example, they’ll let someone pay them for advice on the path to enlightenment but they aren’t even on that path, themselves.  So where is their leadership coming from?  What’s the source?  And what’s the end?  And what’s the essence of their actual motivation for doing so?  

There’s just something about people who are all about being spiritually gifted in some way, but who are also simultaneously owned, ruled, and directed by their ego – while at the same time being accepted as a sort of inspirational shepherd by insecure people who don’t actually know the “real person” underneath, that gets to me.  I mean, it really, really, gets to me.  The ‘ego driven’ feels validated by acceptance and approval, and the shepherded feel like they’ve finally found someone who can lead them in the direction they need to go.  But when you get right down to it, it’s just one person who’s not enough for themselves, blindly leading a whole bunch of other people are also not enough for themselves.  And at the end of the day, both sides feel great about the exchange of power – because that’s what it is.  That’s really – all it is.  

We’re all flawed.  No one among us has ‘it’ figured out.  What’s ‘it’?  Well, let me tell you, if you’re looking for something meaningful to take you to the next level of your own life experience and you think someone else has already discovered it for themselves … then that’s the ‘it’ I’m talking about.   What if there’s a different ‘it’ next year?  Yeah, I’m talking about that ‘it’, too.  They don’t have your ‘it’.  They can’t help you find your ‘it’.  They can do a lot of talking, a lot of writing, a lot of proselytizing, but they’re on a different journey.  And if all their talking, writing, and proselytizing doesn’t already scream that at you, you need to dig the wax out of your ears and slip off the sunglasses you have on because they’re too dark for the room you’re standing in.   

The harder someone sells themselves the more I wonder about their true state of affairs.  True leaders don’t need to forage for followers.  I think that’s something worth keeping in perspective.