Spending your life trying to connect w/ppl you’ll never meet while ignoring the ones right in front of you isn’t “social”. It’s just media. This landscape is great for building your brand but terrible for building your life.
The irony of this post is not lost on me…
One of the largest pitfalls of this platform is the dichotomous feelings it evokes in me. On one hand, it’s given me an avenue to reach and help more people than in person work ever could. On the other, it’s very existence and purpose is counter to the entire message I’m trying to convey. Life is about being present. If you’re constantly seeing the world through captured moments from someone else’s past or fomo about what may occur with some post… that’s not living.
I also work with a lot of people who struggle with body image. These squares have a tendency to exacerbate that to a level beyond that of even the most blatantly photoshopped fashion mags. While curating your feed can help, even those of us who work to help improve things like body image & relationships w/food can likely contribute just due to our own blind spots. Let’s be honest, most of us in the fitness/ nutrition field love to workout and eat for performance. We also tend to be genetically predisposed to having more muscle and less fat than the average human. People tend to gravitate towards what they’re good at…
There’s not really a point to this post other than to articulate my own struggles with balancing my professional and personal life. I love the interaction it can give and the chance to keep up with friends all over the globe. However, I’m also ever cognizant of the inherent narcissism required to spend hours of the day focused on a selfie cam in the hopes that it will lead to “likes & shares” while there’s an entire, beautiful and real world sitting right on the other side of that phone. And I’m not willing to trade that life for the chance at social media popularity.
