You ever get that feeling?

You ever get that feeling?

Where you’re scrolling through your 5 social media apps on repeat wondering why you’re doing it?

Maybe that’s just me.

We turn to our phones every time there’s a break.

Every time you get in an elevator with another person, 75% of the time they’ll pull out their phone.

We’ve forgotten how to talk to people in person.

Text and social media have given us a way to hide behind who we really are.

Would anyone ever yell obscenities at you to your face if they saw you? Probably not, yet it happens every day on social media, especially for those who are successful.

You don’t get anywhere without critics.

You don’t become successful if people always believe in you.

You need doubters.

You need that drive to do something someone else didn’t think was possible.

But that drive has to become internal.

It becomes about you and what you want out of life.

You have to go for it.

Once you’ve decided what you want out of life, get after it.

No one is coming to save you.

You have to help yourself first.

You need to do the research. You need to learn. You need to read.

Then you need to apply yourself and fail.

Once you failed enough times, you learn.

If you keep learning, you’ll go a very long way.

Was having a conversation at dinner with a work colleague today about how little people read.

Most of the population assumes education stops after you graduate from school.

What?

That’s when education should begin.

Sure you don’t have exams anymore telling you to study, but how are you supposed to understand the world without reading?

Yes, you can understand a lot through real experiences, but no person can live enough experiences in their life to understand the world.

The problems you have today have happened before, and they’ll likely happen again.

What if I told you there was a cheat code to figure out how to solve your problems?

That’s what reading feels like.

People don’t read enough.

How do we get kids and adults to get off their phones and read more?

I don’t know because social media apps have billions of dollars and some of the best minds in the world figuring out how to hack your psyche.

Reading can’t do anything like that.

There’s no hacking of your brain.

It’s just a page with words on it vs. what feels like a portal to the rest of the world specifically designed to hack your mind.

For kids, it’s an easy choice.

I’m scared for the generation coming behind me.

Their attention is getting hacked too easily.

It feels like social media has made our society both smarter and stupider.

For the few who value education and continue to follow their curiosities, it’s the greatest time to be alive.

For those who let their brains waste away spending so much time on apps, it ruins your ability to think and focus.

That won’t have consequences today, but it will as you grow older.

We’ve already seen a massive rise in depression and mental health cases over the last decade.

Again, correlation does not equal causation so just because we have social media doesn’t mean that’s why depression cases have gone up, but it’s a pretty good sign.

Especially for young girls.

Shit, Facebook did its own research into how its apps were making young girls way more depressed.

This is bad as these kids grow into adults.

When I was at dinner today, a couple behind me literally sat at the table on their phones the entire meal.

What the fuck?

Why are you going to dinner?

They didn’t even speak to each other.

Social media and phones are taking us out of the moment in front of us.

We forget to enjoy what’s there and would rather look for a distraction to make ourselves feel better about being informed about the world.

But it’s not even the world; it’s your world.

Social media is just a reflection of your own mind back to you. That’s how the algorithms are designed.

They show you what you want to see so that you keep coming back.

There is no objectivity.

You and I are living in vastly different worlds.

So how do you cut out the noise?

It’s really hard because most of the world is noise.

To me, it starts within, and shutting off your phone.

Figure out how you want to live your life.

Figure out what’s important to you.

Write it down right now.

What do you want to accomplish in your life?

What are the steps you can start today to get closer to that goal?

Then baby steps.

Start and do a little bit every day.

Keep going for a while and eventually, you’ll see results vastly higher than you could have ever imagined.

Following your curiosity can be exponential.

Focus on being the best version of you possible and the rest will come.

So do you ever get that feeling that social media is ruining a generation?