I meet up with someone every week for 90 minutes and we have a little Zoom writing date. We don’t know much about each other, just little snippets about the projects we’re each working on. We don’t follow each other on social media, subscribe to each others email lists, or have any connections outside of our weekly writing date. We talk openly and honestly about our work and there are no distractions to those conversations. Our relationship is strictly a writing-based relationship and it is uncomplicated, clear, and supportive in each of our lives.
I love this.
It feels refreshing.
There are many different ways to have similar relationships. The barista you see every Thursday. The person at the office who heads to their lunch break at the same time as you and you walk the halls together. The friendly gym-goer who is also faithfully there at 5 a.m. every weekday. Most of the time these relationships do not cross over into other areas of life. You don’t follow the barista on Instagram or talk to the coworker after hours or snapchat the gym-goer. While there are exceptions, these relationship typically exist in their bubbles and that is perfectly okay. In fact, I think it’s beautiful and wonderful and important for us as a social species.
We all crave deep connections. Gimme a bff. A ride or die. And yes, those are important but I think they stand right alongside those relationships that are more seemingly insignificant and exist only in passing and due to happenstance.
The Covid era has proved this for me. We have landed in a very digitized state of society post-Covid and I think we’re all feeling it without really understanding what it is we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it.
This is something that I have been really looking at and deconstructing this year.
Why do we all feel so lonely and disconnected when technology makes us think we’re more tuned in and connected than ever?
It is a grand illusion raging war on our psyche.
I am going to be working with a new practitioner (more info on this soon) and one thing that I love about her is that she doesn’t have social media. She has a website, an email, and a phone number. #vintagevibes
When I came across her (through a referral via another website, which I also love) the first thing I did was look for her social media links. There weren’t any so I did some sleuthing on social media to eventually realize that she is not out there on social media spreading her message.
Instead of being able to judge her by swiping through her content on Instagram, I actually sat down and read every page of her website.
About me.
The work she does.
Her offerings.
Books she loves.
FAQ.
Contact.
From there I got way more than I would from any social media content because my mind (and potentially yours too) goes into a hyper focused state when scrolling. As soon as those apps open we are seeking dopamine hit after hit and it is very hard to slow it down and absorb the information in a way that actually teaches us something. It’s like eating food. Sure, we can eat food distracted and stressed but when we do it impacts our ability to digest it properly. Same thing for learning. Sure, we can get hits of knowledge on Instagram but the hyper focused dopamine searching program running in our subconscious hinders our ability to learn fully. When I get on a website I have a completely different feeling and experience compared to Instagram. I sit, I read, I absorb, and I do not feel the addictive allure of the swipe of my finger.
As I finished perusing my new practitioners website I didn’t have any immediate judgment, just an open curiosity.
This was the moment I was hit with the realization that not only do I feel a noticeable calm on a website compared to social media but I am always judging people based off of their social media profiles. This is not something I want to do.
At the same time, I’m not someone who believes that judgment is all bad. It’s human nature to judge things, people, whatever… to an extent.
We judge outfits, attitudes, interactions, rooms, cars, food, music, movies, tv, jobs, etc. and I think observing something and cultivating a conclusion of that thing is perfectly a-okay.
BUT.
There’s always a but, isn’t there?
But, I do believe that we so often take things too far in the judgment department and attach to the very judgments we make without realizing we’re doing it or impacting what can potentially manifest from loosening the judgment grip just a bit.
judg·ment
/ˈjəjmənt/
noun
noun: judgement
the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Considered decisions, not quick passing perceptions. Also, sensible which means “chosen in accordance with wisdom or prudence; likely to be of benefit.”
Likely to be of benefit. Stemming from wisdom. That definition isn’t resonant of the judgments that most of us are making as we go about our daily lives.
This whole topic reminds me of Yoga Sutra 1.33 which states, “By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness.”
Patanjali divides human interactions into four categories. They are known as the “four locks and four keys.” The “locks” are the challenges we face in daily interactions and the “keys” are used to cultivate calm in mind no matter what is happening externally. It is a practice of how to be, not what to do.
Lock 1: Happiness
Key 1: Friendliness
Lock 2: Unhappiness
Key 2: Compassion
Lock 3: Virtuous
Key 3: Delight
Lock 4: Non-virtuous
Key 4: Equanimity
That all sounds great, right? Makes a lot of sense. Why wouldn’t you meet happiness with friendliness? Sounds easy and sometimes it is, of course. But, sometimes there are mixed emotions with why another person is happy. Maybe they got a job that you’ve been wanting or a big raise that will get them out of debt while you’re still struggling financially and you feel a bit jealous. It can be challenging to emit a true sense of friendliness in that situation if you are attached to other emotions surrounding the circumstance. This is human nature and it’s okay, but awareness and practice can help to be in a different way.
While it is important to integrate the four locks and keys into interactions with others, it is even more important to practice them with ourselves. When we do, the neural pathways of our judgmental nature begin to reroute and rebuild into a new way of being.
For me, this new way of being looks like a complete overhaul of my relationship with social media. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and I think that’s what a lot of us do when it comes to our social media addictions. *raises hand sky high* If I just become more mindful when I’m scrolling it will be different. If I just get on social media for 5 minutes I’ll get my hit and I’ll be good for the entire day. I took a break from social media for a few days so I’m reset and ready to have a new relationship with it. It’s the same spin cycle over and over and over again.
In this article by Rosie Spinks about the friendship problems we all face she shares a quote from Esther Perel on this podcast (interview starts at about the 50:00 mark). I haven’t listened to the episode yet but the quote was so resonant for me that I had to share.
“Modern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat. That loneliness, which is really a depletion of the social capital, is extremely powerful. […]
One question I keep asking that I had no idea was going to be so pertinent: When you grew up, did you play freely on the street? … And the majority of the people learned to play freely on the street. They learned social negotiation. They learned unscripted, un-choreographed, unmonitored interaction with people. They fought, they made rules, they made peace, they made friends, they broke up, they made friends again. They developed social muscles. And the majority of these very same people’s children do not play freely on the street. And I think that an adult needs to play freely on the street as well.
For us as adults, that means talking to people in the queue with you, talking to people on the subway, talking to people when you create any kind of group. Book club, movie club, sports club. You stay in the practice of experimentation, doubt, of the paradox of people: You need people very much but the very people that you need are the ones that can reject you.
We do not have the practice at the moment. Everything about predictive technologies is basically giving us a form of assisted living. You get it all served in uncomplicated, lack of friction, no obstacles and you no longer know how to deal with people. Because people are complex systems. Relationships, friendships are complex systems. They often demand that they hold two sides of an equation. And not that you solve little problems with technical solutions. And that is intrinsic to modern loneliness.”
When I go to the grocery store I see so many people with AirPods in as a way of tuning out the world around them and tuning into their own little self created universe of false connection, or as Esther Perel puts it, modern loneliness. I see even more Instacart shoppers in place of people too busy or too lazy or too stressed by public spaces to do their own grocery shopping. Bringing the Covid era discussion back into this space, two years of forced masking and social distancing did not help to cultivate connection. Even though the Covid lockdowns were a giant experiment and failure now that the government has loosed its grip, we are living out the “new normal” of collective trauma of social isolation tyranny. We have seemingly forgot the tribulations of that time while still suffering the consequences of the psychological warfare placed upon society as a whole. Actually, I don’t think we’ve forgotten at all. I think we are outright ignoring the impact that it all had on us because it was all sorts of fucked up for all of us in so many ways and to talk about it is to deconstruct it, work through it, accept it, and overcome the anguish of it all.
Why would we do that when we can instead lie to ourselves and scroll endlessly through other peoples lives to numb it all out?
Why would we do that when we can instead listen to podcast after podcast, feeling like we are gaining knowledge without recognition of the consumption loop we are stuck in?
Why would we do that when we can instead order our groceries online, Doordash our dinner, and binge watch the new season of Love Is Blind on Netflix?
Why would we work through all of the fuckery?
The answer is most likely different for us all but for me it’s simply because I recognize the modern loneliness in my life. I feel it in myself and I feel it in others around me, in friends and strangers alike.
We generally are not the same as we were in February 2020 and the lack of eye contact, social interaction, and human connection proves that to us all when we really take a look at it.
I always like to turn to Reddit in times of questioning things like this and as always, it didn’t let me down. People are lonely. They share things like, “the last three years has decimated my social life. My relationships with every member of my family and my friends has drastically changed. I have drastically changed. Looking back at photos that were taken of myself and friends shortly before March 2020, I have a hard time relating to them.” and posts like that get 2,000 upvotes and over 500 comments of people mostly agreeing. We have lost our social skills and are now just realizing it while wondering how to get them back.
When I step away from it all I know what I want. It’s clear. I want long books to learn from, time in nature to make true connection with the world around me, writing-based friendships, chatty baristas, deep talks with a few close friends, small talk about green beans in the produce section of Whole Foods, a quick chat with a passing neighbor on a walk, friends that actually show up to scheduled get-togethers, websites to learn from instead of Instagram profiles to scroll, and a society that is not emitting feelings of stress, anxiety, and dread of being in public spaces.
I recognize that to be a list of high expectations, including some things that are out of my control, but the only way to spark change is to initiate it within yourself. Starting somewhere is better than not starting at all. And having these conversations can create conversations that cultivate a cascade of change.
If we want to see change, we must commit to the practice of doing things differently.
It sounds like a lofty goal and a long road, but I do believe it to be possible.
If we want to see a different world, on a large scale and among our immediate circles, we must be the ones to act. If not us, then who?
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