It’s so easy to get lost these days in other people’s lives. Lost in what they’re doing, thinking and saying. Lost in the fantasy of how much better (happier, healthier, more fulfilling) their lives are than our own.
Many of us are spending inordinate amounts of time “following” other people and calling it a life. Our precious energy and attention bound up in other people’s carefully constructed antics; endlessly scrolling and thinking about another person’s so-called “life.” Too often, to the detriment of our own do we believe that these curated and caricature-like representations depict something real. Something we have convinced ourselves we can have by association.
Something so worth following because…
I’ll tell you what’s worth following: YOU. Your life. All of it. What’s noteworthy, and what’s not working. Why? Because it’s real. Because by being with it, all of it, is the only way that you will ever know whether or not what you’re doing is working for you.
By following another, we miss ourselves. Our thoughts. Our dreams. Our needs. And we run the risk of following the wrong things. Duped into believing in that old adage “The grass is always greener…,” we become hypnotized by the pretty lights and pretty pictures; abandoning our own lives in favor of someone else’s.
But the Truth is, you have your own unique patch of grass that needs tending to. Your own mind to cultivate and body to care for. Your own soul to nourish. Without which, they atrophy and die on the barren ground of believing someone else’s grass is preferable to yours. Poisoned by aligning with the collective envy and orientation that says, someone else is doing better than you. Someone else knows better than you. Someone else’s life is more desirable than yours.
I think part of the reason we do this is because it’s easier to be enamored or envious of another life, then it is to take stock of our own. Easier to fill our days with the comings and goings of other’s presentational lives than it is to be with ourselves. While it gives us a momentary thrill, that ubiquitous hit of dopamine, the cost is high to medicate ourselves in this way.
Each time we turn towards yet another post, deep down we know something is not actually right here. And it haunts us. Like the ghost of Christmas Past and Future, outlining for us what we are losing in our obsession by tracking other people’s lives at the expense of our own.
What if you began to swap out how often you follow, and chose instead to be the leader in your own life? What might you discover about yourself by making your life as noteworthy as those you follow? By choosing the full reality of your life as opposed to the illusory one as delivered by a two-dimensional, screen-version of what it means to be alive.