Have you ever found yourself so wrapped up in everything going on around you that you stop living your life the way you desire to? By this I mean, those minutes or maybe hours you spend on social media have eaten away at your life and before you know it, your day is gone. Precious time you will never get back. For what? To read about everyone else’s gripes, triumphs, trials and photos with dirty jokes they re-posted from someone else.
Today I found myself starting my morning as the productive Krislee. The one who faces her day head on all while forgetting to eat until her tummy can no longer ignore its emptiness. The one who works tirelessly into the day only to glance at the clock and wonder how much more she can squeeze in before everyone gets home.
After putting in a solid morning of remodel finish work (on the wood stove hearth pad…yay!), my tummy was running on empty by 11:30am. Like so many of you out there, I find it far too easy to surf social media while munching on last night’s leftovers. It is a way to take a load off, chill out and just be mindless for a little while as I’m enjoying cold ribs and baked beans.
While it’s nice to read about someone being proud of their child’s good grades or sharing how they have successfully overcome certain struggles in their life, social media is also filled with negativity. Everyone has problems and it seems that quite a few people are eagerly willing to share them.
Not only is the negativity generated through status posts via various friends on social media but it’s also within the so called “news” articles. An article is posted, shared, commented on, torn apart or rather dissected by 10 million other viewers wasting their time while eating lunch.
In my case, I was caught up in commenting on a political video clip I just happened to scroll to. Now, I’m not a very political person, I don’t claim a party preference and quite frankly I think political correctness is the root of all evil. But, I did not let this stop me, I commented without thinking of the repercussions.
A reply from an expressively opposing point of view followed and for whatever reason I commented AGAIN! What was I doing!?! By no means did I want to argue with anyone, it wasn’t about who was right…in fact I felt we both were. However, after my second go round I had to shake myself back to reality. This was not me, this was not a situation I wanted to be involved in and I wanted free of all the negativity I was subjecting myself to.
Because I recognized my own freedom of choice (thank God) I was able to step out of the situation and ultimately decided to take a break from social media. I changed my profile photo to reflect my soon to be absence, typed out a paragraph or five about how tired I was of news, politics and the albeit brief, but negative snapshots of other people’s lives.
It was time to live my own life for a while. They’d see no more photos of that day’s chicken egg haul or blurry videos of the goose migration. They’d only see my Dirt On My Plate blogs post to my account, maybe a few Instagram photos, but the rest of my life would be mine.
I probably offended people by sharing some of the types of posts that brought me down, I don’t really know. In fact, I won’t really know until I return and page through the notifications – IF I page through them. In the end, I wished everyone well in their endeavors, I even shared my love for everyone as a whole.
One day, when I return to that venue, I’ll do so on my terms. I’ll filter out the things I don’t want to see, leaving only things that lift me up and give me faith in humanity’s optimism. I know that putting on those rose colored glasses won’t give me the most accurate snapshot of the world and that’s okay. Those rose colored glasses will however show me the world I wish to live in, one that is full of positivity.
I can’t control the world, but I can control how I wish see it.
CHALLENGE: If you are on social media, take the time to think about what you post. Realize that what you put out into the world will reflect back to you – positivity breeds positivity! Make it a goal to post only the good things in your life or articles that make you feel good. The world will be a better place for it and next year’s memory posts will bring a smile to your face.
Dirt On My Plate 