I love backpacking because I can get away in both the physical and virtual sense. There’s nothing like a complete displacement from everything I know and giving myself time to unfocus and refocus back on what we’re really doing here; just trying to survive. We’ve filled our lives to eat up our precious time and attention with every form of entertainment we can imagine. The king of attention, social media, has transformed into boardwalk & park place with little red hotels monopolizing the lion’s share of our livelihood. It offers both risk and reward depending on whether you own it, or it owns you.
I gave up all social media apps five years ago and just focused on experiencing life and relationships in a way that feels more organic. Good old fashioned face-to-face, blended with elements of fate and chance, and text messages peppered in between. When I decided to leave my career and focus on business, my old social bubble of nurses popped. I discovered how lonely this entrepreneur road really is. There was nobody I could really talk to about it besides God. I believe God communicates to each of us differently and for me, it’s through a seemingly random idea. He gave me a plan and I followed through. I needed to shake things up a bit because I got too comfortable with what I knew. Nature was calling, the brand needed to be built, and I didn’t know that popping my social bubble was exactly what I needed.
The plan God gave me was to return to social media and share my journey. This time with a specific goal and vision. The irony of this transition is that I’m seeing with fresh eyes how social media funnels everyone into, you guessed it, social bubbles. The beauty of being off the social media grid and starting anew is that the “algorithm” has not yet figured out what I like, watch, spend more time on, engage with, and share. So I’m seeing my feed and highlights filled with completely random content. And I loved it. But why?
Sometimes I wonder how many of us are artists but never received that critical, early encouragement. We live with an ever-present anxiety because we grew up never realizing that we’re artists at all. I’m starting to see the signs, in colors, the contractions of time, and in the social media that provides us an outlet for our curiosities. Being exposed to so many unique types of minds, ideas, and talents made me feel like we’re all just trying to create something meaningful. We’re all artists in our own way and we want to share that with the world. There’s a magic in finding your tribe and social media does this really well.
I think everyone needs to take a moment to see the world from a stranger’s perspective. Create a new email account and don’t put in any real information. Use a fake name, fake birthdate, fake everything. Then register a new account for a social media app. Skip everything that tries to target interests or hobbies. If it’s required, enter something random. Then go see what the app shows you in the highlights and expose yourself to something new. I never expected to see so much inspirational bible content, hunting, fishing, and gun photos. The point is if we’re always being shown things that only like-minded people enjoy, then we stay inside that bubble for the rest of our lives. It’s good to get a baseline of life through our digital lives but it’s important to get out there physically and find out if it’s really true. There’s nothing more exciting than transforming your beliefs through this experience because it completely changes the way you see the world. It makes me feel, alive.