“The oxymoron of freedom is that it must submit to rules of morality or it will succumb to the rot of tyranny.” ~
So-cial – late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin socialis ‘allied,’ from socius meaning ‘friend.’
Me-di-a – the means of communication that reaches large numbers of people.
Facebook used to be a way to connect with your friends, a medium to find out what was going on in their lives and informing others of what was happening in yours. And yes, like most social media, your “friends” thought it was important to share a photo and to inform you that they just ordered a half-caf, half-decaf, skinny, no foam, caramel-macchiato latte at the Starbucks next to your house with their BFF (who wasn’t you).
In the beginning, Facebook and other social media outlets had an innocence about them…and then something changed.
Facebook No More!
The last time I scrolled down my Facebook page before I cancelled my account, I remembering being struck by how my page was filled with ad after ad and post after post filled with nothing but political hatred and ridiculously false narratives. I
t seems as though Facebook and other forms of social media have become a place for folks to project their inner dissatisfaction and hatred for themselves out into the world.
You see the only thing you can project outwardly is the inner landscape of what’s going on inside of you.
That, in and of itself should scare the hell out’ve you and cause you to pause before you post, except for the fact that most people don’t know this!
Facebook transformed from being a friendly social channel into being an algorithmically driven profit-center driven by greed!
Social Media & Freedom
Sigmund Freud once said, “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
And yet, social media has given us an extraordinary amount of freedom to say what we want to say, post what we want to post, whether we have the facts or not.
It is a medium to voice our opinions without any sense of responsibility for what we post. I find irony in the fact that we have become a society who screams for freedom and yet revolts at the thought of being held responsible for our actions, especially when someone with opposing views speaks out or intentionally posts false news just to stir s*** up!
And with our actions to exercise our freedoms, we become prisoners…quite the oxymoron if you ask me.
The Prison That is Social Media
Have you ever noticed that while looking through Facebook you are constantly bombarded by ads for products you were having a conversation with someone about 30 minutes ago?
Or you may may find that you are blasted with ads for products you searched for 2 days ago because your searches are being tracked. And yes, you if you have Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, you have given those companies a front row seat to your life, your buying habits, and your conversations.
You see, the longer Facebook and other Social Media giants can keep you engaged, the more ad revenue they collect. Ever sat in front of your computer screen watching TikTok videos, one after another after another, until you realized you just devoted an hour of your life watching stupid pet videos?
That’s because your brain is being hijacked!
The Blue Whale of Social Media
Blue whales are one of the behemoths of the ocean and can devour up to 16 tons of food a day.
Advertising has become the insatiable Blue whale in the ocean of social media and it has a mission. To devour hundreds of hours of your time, attention, and chunks of your life while it generates billions of dollars in ad revenue. It cannot ever be fed enough!
Abraham Lincoln said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
Social media is literally destroying our culture from the inside out. It is creating division and separation among us at a pace never seen or experienced in the history of mankind.
Maybe, it is time to take back your freedom and to reclaim possession of your life.
Are you Game?
10 Things You Can Do To Take Back Your Freedom:
Below is a list of 10 things you can do to stop destroying yourself from the inside and start taking back your freedom.
- Stop leveraging social media to voice hatred – it speaks more about your inner landscape than the person you are projecting about.
- Start taking responsibility for what you feed your mind – garbage in and garbage out.
- The one thing that constantly trips you up is you and your ego. Ego is defined as your level of self-worth or self-importance. If your self-worth is tied to the number of likes you get on Facebook … you’re screwed!
- Start taking responsibility for what you are creating in your life. Remember, that like attracts like – hatred attracts more hatred, love attracts more love, forgiveness attracts more forgiveness, what do you attract?
- Don’t be gullible by believing everything that you read – most stuff is just someone’s opinion – and you know what they say about opinions … everyone has one.
- Just because someone wants to project their inner landscape on the world with anger – doesn’t mean you have to buy-in or do the same thing. It robs you of your freedom to choose
- The media makes billions of dollars by stirring emotion and creating dissent so that they can run ads for companies that want to stir emotion and get you to buy more stuff – you don’t have to support them.
- Buying more things only dulls the inner dissatisfaction with yourself for so long. Eventually, you end up where you started before you bought all those thing … by yourself … only now with less money!
- You cannot control the world or anyone else. You only can control yourself. You take control of yourself and your life when you begin to take control of what you think (See #2).
- Remember that life is short, your legacy will be told by what others say about you … not what you posted about yourself on Facebook.
And by the way…for the record, regarding the oxymoron that is freedom and social media?
Oxy means sharp, a moron is defined as an ignorant person. An oxy-moron is literally defined as a sharp, ignorant person. See the paradox?
Everyday you have a choice to be sharp and free or ignorant and imprisoned…I hope we all choose to be sharp, more times than we choose to be ignorant.
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