I think that it isn’t a secret that we are a terrible generation at keeping secrets. As usual, I’ll generate many excuses as to why I think that it is the way it is. Let me start with the ultimate mediocre excuse that “everyone is doing it”. Everyone is posting a story of every part of their day, even though as I was promoting my blog I found out that even a person’s closest friends go by their story very quickly that they seldom look at the content. I’m your typical Millennial & Omega Generation (Gen Z) guilty to counting my likes as they directly correlate with my confidence with the photo I posted or even my own self-esteem. My days pass by while I look at influencers living their lives trying houses in the Maldives, going to events I only dream of going to, eating food that I wish I could have taken photos off. All of that while keeping my account public mimicking their actions and taking a photo of the pasta I had last night, does this sound familiar.
I find myself constantly pondering when I go to any type of leisure event whether I should take a photo / video that I can show my friends later versus me just enjoying the show and as my friend Eckhart Tolle says: “enjoy the now”, which I usually don’t and I end up enjoying the video recorded later while I listen to it with my headsets laying down on the couch. We’ve become these monsters, that have our phones stuck on our hands using rings video taping every portion of our day, forgetting that the whole reason we take these photos or videos is to remind us how that day made us feel, except we no longer feel anything.
I didn’t focus on the word privacy and I made the star word of this article the word “secret”. No one is really invading our privacy. We are just the worse generation at keeping our lives secret. Our utilization of social media tools is extremely wrong and can cause a large amount of damage to our reputation and career prospects. Somehow our reputation no longer matters, the world has convinced us that we can be as free and relentless in our freedom. Well social butterfly, that’s not true. The human brain works in a way that is purely judgmental. We all make judgements, but we say we never act upon it. The problem with that is that the HR of the company you want to enter only needs one excuse when rejecting you, “your talents and skills do not align with that of the position.” Some might even add the occasional “other candidates were deemed a better fit, and we regret to inform you we will not be moving forward with your application.” We showcase a large portion of our lives, accept all the cookies that exist on every site and then blame Mark Zuckerberg for invading our privacy. Did you ever think that maybe your public social media account had something that didn’t align with the person interviewing you? Sleep on that, it is worth a thought, I’m sure you thought of that, but did you actively do something to stop posting? Making your account private or the such?
Did you ever think that Mark and founders with similar unprecedented programming skills might lack the necessary social skills at communicating with other humans and therefore created an application, that facilitates that? I’m not a psychological guru, but is it also possible that applications such as Facebook, Tinder, Instagram, YouTube, among others are comfort food to the soul that an extrovert ends up becoming attached to his / her phone and introverted while an introvert finds his way through life. Can Mr. healthy six pack become obese? Even the most malicious introvert doesn’t need to show every part of his / her day to become socially adequate. I think there are limits and we are definitely pushing the limits to the barf barf barf barf borders.
I promised myself when I started this blog / movement whatever you want to call it that I wouldn’t just critique blindly, that I would have solutions for whatever I was commentating on. I do, and I think it all boils back to “ambiguity is sexy”, someone wise once taught me that. I like to compare everything to food but Mr. & Mrs. Millennial, were you ever having a cake eating all the yummy crème on top just to find out that the buttered crust hiding below was “1000 times” (Millennial expression used to extravagantly showcase ‘much much more’) as delicious as what you’ve been focusing on. Remember how good that felt? You ought to treat yourself as the ‘cake of ambiguity’, that’s a new term coined right there, and the more your audience searched the more they find buttered crusts to taste. So I came up with some rules that made my life a tad bit better:
-Limit the categories of your story posting for example, I post the beach a lot of food, specifically my own cooking and occasionally my friends & family but that’s it.
-Stay off social media sometimes, leave your phone at home go for a three-hour walk.
-Delete the apps your addicted to for a week or so. Decide to detach from your phone, it will fix much of your privacy issues and guess what social media companies will only be able to use some parts of your data because the rest will be extremely ambiguous.
-Look for hobbies that don’t put you on your phone much often (archery, horse back riding, martial arts, just to name a few)
-Create that rule with friends, weekends with board games no phones allowed (agree to one person bringing their phone in the case of emergencies like ordering a pizza!)
Please let us know in the comment section if you try any of this and what other things you’ve been doing to help stay away from your gadgets!
Photo by Gian Cescon
themillennialstage.net 