Our Loneliness, My Answer
Dear steemians,
This is a raw post for me. It's not a helpful guide, and it's not full of funny gifs. What it is full of is emotion and hopefully a message for young people feeling lost or alone, especially those of you who have turned to steemit in the hopes of finding people who care about your thoughts and experiences. Afterwords you'll find my own answer to this pain that many feel, and in would love your own comments about how you've grown stronger than your own struggles.
It is very likely that if you are reading this, and you are part of that special “everyone gets a free punch at them” generation the Millennials, and if you are, you suffer from depression, anxiety, or a wracked pain of isolation and self loathing. Frankly, I would be curious to meet someone around my age who doesn’t struggle with one of these. I would trail them back to their time machine and hop a ride back to where they came from, because it obviously isn’t Earth circa 2016. These battles with isolation and anguished hopelessness are not unique problems anymore, but the head cold of a generation.
Our Loneliness is not the lack of people in our your life. No, loneliness is having people in your life but having no connection to them. It is the feeling that you are perhaps experiencing a different reality than your peers, for better or for worse. As they say, it is lonely at the top- and I am sure that people like Nikoli Tesla or David Wallace were very lonely as they wondered amidst their own genius, lamenting the fact that so few in the world could really get them, could get their ideas, their lives, could finally connect with how they saw things.
This perhaps is the greatest irony of a generation born into irony, molded by it. So many young people struggling to feel connected and engaged, hoping, wishing for just a connection with someone that is earnest and real. The grand irony that in our sincerely human attempt to find belonging and engagement with others, we have ignored the simplest way to do so. We have marginalized IRL. Real life is that thing we do privately in short burst. Real life is masturbation.
We put ourselves out there on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, Tinder, snapchat…we present a veneer of what we want others to think we are. This is a vain attempt to find somebody, anybody to connect with. We do this because we are so fucking saturated in marketing that we start to think marketing as a natural facet of existence. No one will like you for you! Science shows that people who include a joke in their profile get more swipes! Skill and character mean nothing, only the gods of social engagement can dictate success! Buy gold! Buy the latest Hollywood reboot of your childhood! Sate your need for childhood fun!
But Nostalgia is not a painful memory of a simpler time for this generation. Nostalgia is a recollection of time when we and others were earnest and real. We were trading not just the cards and digital lives of pokemon in playgrounds, but the excitement. We weren’t trying to sell ourselves to a potential mate, we were crushing on Alyssa, dreaming of lewd things (NSFW warning) like holding her hand.
when I wrote this originally, it ended with a paragraph admitting I had no idea how to end this thought. At the time, didn't. I was lost, seeking meaning in a world that has none. I'm happy to say that's not the case anymore.
I have discovered that what many of us lack is the ability to believe. I'm not talking a religious belief. Growing up in a post modern apocalypse of meaning, where everything has not only been done before, but has been torn down, remixed, and repackaged, you lose faith that anything can be true or have worth.
But the solution to this is to instead focus on the dialog within yourself, to the the tools afforded to you to craft something more. Don't worry! I'm not about to go into a "have you heard the good news brother!" Speech. Quite the opposite.
Imagine for a moment an idealized version of you. Everything about that you is exactly as you wish it were. Sheer abs, loving spouse, successful kids, a garden, all of it. Every action you take is exactly the one you want to take.
If this is an idealized version of you, surely it has some meaning that it cares about, it has faith in something. You can't tell exactly what that is, but something is pushing this idyllic you to be so great. This ideal you is created wholly by you, just now, when you read this. And here's my answer to the problem of post modern nihilism:
this means you can find meaning in your own life by having a dialog with your ideal or "Higher" self. It can guide you to be more like it!
So how does this relate to steemit? Because at the heart of it, Steemit is about discovering and rewarding valuable experiences. If you start this process of discovering what purpose you serve, your teleological purpose, and you create content about that purpose, it will attract others who recognize it's value. What I'm proposing is that the best path to success here is to drop the marketing and whale chasing. Stop writing posts about what you think will be popular, and start writing posts that you would find interesting!
Steemit has offered me a platform where I can Do this, and it's written in pure economics. My most successful posts are my parenting articles, something tied intimately to who I am and some of my most sincere writing. My least successful were short, admittedly vapid stuff that I thought would go over well.
Below I've shared a few posts that I think meet this criteria too. Articles that seen passionate and earnest, written in the pursuit of something better. I hope you take my words to heart and go out to make your own better self on Steemit!
V.V.V.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@lucy-and-dan/hello-steemit-our-names-are-lacey-and-dan
https://steemit.com/love/@ericdyce/how-i-got-my-girl-to-say-yes-2017623t234754819z
Fam, this is great, totally relatable, efficiently articulated. Keep writing like this
Very nicely written.
I'm very fortunate. I'm 22, young, and don't suffer from social anxiety, depression, bipolar, or the like.
But many of my peers do.
We're reaching what I believe to be a breaking point. A point where technology and the digital age have the potential to reunite us and bring us closer and make us more interconnected, or to isolate us more than we've ever been before.
We're living in a very exciting a volatile time in human history right now. A time where everything is moving so fast, so fierce, in directions that nobody is able to fully understand because nobody has seen anything like this before.
But in spite of all that, your central message, of being true to yourself and expressing what you really feel, not what you think people will like, is sound. And I believe it's that mindset, coupled with our changing world, that will bring us into a better and further connected future.
Good read : )
Excellent post. Always love your writing style, no matter the topic. Definitely agree that we are over-saturated with tech and marketing these days. The genuine connection is harder and harder to find, but its also that much more special when you do find it. Following to see what other great work you put out going forward! And I also really appreciate the mention! Cheers, friend.
You done a amazing job at writing this. It was like you were reading this to me. Thank you for the mention it really does mean a lot that you noticed we are writing about things that interest us and not things that are solely for that big payout.
Your a very talented writer with some food useful information not only for the younger generations but for all of us. Thank you for referencing my post, much appreciated. Stay humble my friend and Steem on!!
I cried.
Resonates. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, think i'm in agreement with it all.
Stephan Molyneux calls that Me Plus, people will only like you if its you plus wealth, or you plus fun .
Hadn't heard of that, interesting! Thanks for sharing.