Think about your attention. How do you spend your attention in a day, in a week, month, year? How much of your awareness is directed in observing other people’s lives? Consider if you took your awareness, your attention, and began redirecting it to your own life and your experience in the now.
If you’re a social media user I invite you to begin to contemplate the amount of your life that you are using to “follow” others. Social media is designed to entice users to “follow” rather than to “lead”. Is it worth it? Are you getting your attention’s worth? How valuable is your experience of this life and are you willing to sacrifice the experience of your own life so that you can observe and judge someone else’s? Ask yourself if your life were to come to a sudden end tomorrow, or perhaps later today, would you have lived fully or did postpone living your fullest life potential while you were scrolling through media feeds?
Meta, or what used to be known as Facebook (and Instagram), Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit are creating generations of unconscious “users”. Motivated by consumerism and data acquisition, the giant social media monstrosities are taking over our minds, health, and wallets, while wreaking havoc on the emotional stability of the citizens of the world and luring users into creating false realities, illusions of hate, and facades of perfection. They lock people in the prison of addictive scrolling behavior, and you’re allowing them facilitate you life experience. Media is holding you and millions of other humans hostage.
Social media is a major source of suffering in the emotional health in a majority of its users. Most attributable to ego, comparing lifestyle, status, beauty, while facilitating hatred and fear in the many millions of social media posts, thread, video’s and what can only be described as “entertainment”. Using Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, yes dating apps, and the thousands of other apps is counter to being aware of ones present existence, ultimately the user is “fed” other’s, often false, interpretation of life.
I decided to leave the social media game back in 2020 after an assignment in a university meditation course. You could say that the week I was challenged to completely unplug from all devices was addictive for me. Deleting Facebook, Instagram and even personal messages from my life for 7 days proved to be transformative for me. I relished in the complete attention to what I was doing moment to moment in my day and not being compelled to look at my phone or check my email, resisting the desire to scroll through an Instagram feed was truly liberating, like inspiring a breath pf fresh air after having been asphyxiated for a while.
The frequent call to action (scrolling and swiping) is rewiring brain circuits, causing firing between neurons too frequently to be sustainable. Dopamine is an addictive neuromudulator and we all seek to trigger its release in one way or another, whether from a good workout or a shot of methamphetamine (highest NT release), but it has a limit to which it can continue to spark your inner vitality. Each high eventually has a drop below baseline, the higher the release the lower the drop which leads to depression and loss of vital force energy. At least that’s how I understand it with my modest scientific education, my yogic studies, and my own cardiovascular training. I am a self confessed dopamine addict but I choose to trigger the physiology in real life rather than from behind a screen.
As a yogi the dedication to my practice instilled an anti-ego campaign for myself. I became nauseated by the “egoist everything” on social media and the shallowness of much of what is being pumped out to the masses. I want to connect with people in person, in my life, through eye contact and communication. I’m tired of emoji expression of emotions, they’re giving people and easy out instead of heartfelt communication, and real words spelled out. Think about words as spell casting, how much magic can you make with an emoji?
Social media users are losing the ability to be unique. Real people are not an avatars or Twitter handles, they should just be authentic in themselves, they need to accept themselves as they are rather than an illusion of Be-ing someone else.
Words can be warm and cold, but expression can be translated easily if it truly comes from the heart. I humbly have to remind myself every day to just love and be kind in my words. I can forgive anyone at this point because I know that only love will allow me to thrive. If I generate love then I will be energized, it’s so simple and quite obvious when you think about it. Truly experiencing the emotion of love releases oxytocin, our happiness hormone. Love is sustainable.
My own story of social media sensationalism and how I became a “villain” over night is an interesting on, an eye opener for me, and for you.
Can I entice you to read more about it?
Concerned about a Social Media Feed about Me?
I’m going to begin by saying I have never given a bike tour of Portland’s homeless encampments and I have never offered “Slum Tours” on my website. The “idea” was something I posted on my neighborhood Nextdoor app that I deleted after 2 days. The idea died for me the day I deleted it although I still think people need to acknowledge and bear witness to the tent cities which right now exist on all our major bike routes, to open the eyes of the public to the fact that people are suffering and dying out there everyday.
My post on Nextdoor was screen shot and sent off to a creative Portland local who brought it to life on Twitter and ran with it, distorting all my intentions and making me out to be a villain and stating repeatedly that I was currently giving “slum tours” for profit. Twitter turned to TikTok, Instagram and then Reddit and the rest is history.
Please read on for the truth.
It was my intention to grab the attention of my neighbors on Nextdoor and it was also a follow up post to a long debate about homelessness in Portland after my kayak was stolen. My boat was eventually spotted by a Nextdoor user who saw it down by the Willamette River. I won’t go into too much detail but I essentially gave it to a homeless man living under a tarp. A lot of people thought it was great but many voices were upset and that I would let it go to a man who they perceived as a thief. A lot of derogatory language and misconceptions about people living outside were expressed via my kayak story post which concerned me.
Portland has a homeless catastrophe on its hands and as a cyclist covering 80-100 miles a week last year I was encountering huge tent cities, one after the other, every day. Riding through the communities of these people is very intimate (and potentially hazardous) on a bike, you see everything up close and personal. It occurred to me that if the public would see the brutal life of these people then maybe some change could begin. I fantasized about wealthy philanthropists and the possibility of taking Portland City Council and Ted Wheeler on a “tour”.
The city is constantly moving camps out of areas and disposing of the belongings of the people staying there. Where do the people go when swept out of areas? They live in insecurity and always starting over. They are always having to “get” more stuff, and so Portlanders think of them all as drug addicts and thieves. Things are dire in Portland and no real change is in site. I’ve seen a dead man on the sidewalk in the middle of the heatwave last summer which made me think of Portland as third world, as do many of the “encampments” all along the I205 bike path, marine drive, NE 33rd Ave, under every bridge, and deep into the woods. When you’re on a bike riding through the mess of tent cities everything is really raw and I ride through them at least 5 days a week.
The City of Portland is selling out to huge real estate developers, collecting property taxes on the ever escalating price of housing. Major corporations do business here, the state and city urging big business to call Portland home but scarcely funds the housing crisis, drug rehabilitation, social services, or education for low income residents. It was my intention to grab the attention of my neighbors on Nextdoor. I did but it wasn’t exactly the debate I was looking for so I deleted the post.
Most Portlanders just try to avoid looking at those people, close their eyes to the real issues, and hope they’ll be driven out of their neighborhoods while the churches and non profits foot most of the aid work.
The truth is I can’t give a bike tour in Portland without passing rows of tents along the various routes. I felt compelled to consider how I could expose the realities of the tents communities I ride by every day so that change could be made. I assure you my intentions were honorable. I work with the homeless and people in need in Portland and have since prior to Covid. I served lunches at Picnic in the Park and I currently volunteer with a church to provide services to street people in downtown Portland.
I used inflammatory language to get attention but I realize “slum” is offensive to Westerners and my reference to “slum tours” being part of my business was callous. I do regret saying I would take payment, or that I insinuated it would be for profit. I didn’t ever expect someone to take me up on a tent city tour, it was an idea that never came to fruition. People took it very literally and were upset so I quickly deleted the post, it was never an “ad".
Unfortunately before I could take it down someone screenshot it and then sent it to Twitter for distortion and then a bunch of people with questionable motives jumped on board to make it even more sensational.
I repeatedly told the person who create the Twitter sensation that I wasn’t offering the tours but he still continues to fuel and distort the story. He then went on to try to destroy my relationships with all my business associates and my landlord and ruin me financially. He even showed up in front of my house to intimidate me.
If you were shocked by what you saw on social media I am sorry. I think that there are people who want to “create” stories for their own excitement. Social media “creators” search for anything to use as entertainment, even if they leave the truth far behind.
I wouldn’t consider doing encampment tours but I do think that the situation needs more exposure and on a front lines level. I would love to do a documentary project to humanize people on the streets, allow them to share their stories so solutions can be found and implemented earlier, before they end up without a permanent home. I don’t know if it will happen, but something radical needs to be done.
Kat Severi