← Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary)
Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary)
Five minute magic pt.36 - Breaking the spell of digital delusion (from endless scrolling to meaningful growth)
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- [00:01]
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Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week, I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business, or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audiobook and you can find the link to the full version in the show Notes below. In a world of Success Porn, Money porn and Creative Porn, our social media feeds bombard us with idolized versions of reality that can leave us feeling perpetually inadequate. Despite having more access to information than ever before, we often find ourselves caught in cycles of stress and overwork, chasing undefined horizons of success. While valuable insights exist amongst the chaos of endless scrolling, you rarely slow down enough to notice them. Today we'll explore how to recognize the warning signs that take us off course and learn to take meaningful actions before we crash. So today we'll talk about the importance of tuning into the right channels and signals.
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Tuning into the Right Channels if it's easy to paint our chances in a positive light, then it's even easier to buy into the success mindset that is sold to us every day. If you were to take a snapshot of the mainstream media, print, TV and digital and less gatekept user generated content, then you'd see how much of it is populated with messaging likely to make us feel anxious, stressed and underachieving. Every other YouTube video seems to be prefaced by an advert starring a self certified millionaire trying to hard sell you their money making course. When you want to catch up on the latest tweets, you'll quickly be bombarded with people boasting about their material wealth or their moral brilliance. As fast as you can blink, you'll be informed that you need to do more, better, faster. You need to upscale your skill sets to make your first million. Because alongside speed, another major metric of success, creativity and happiness is of course money. These kinds of messages can be best described as money porn and success porn pornographic because they present a make believe world filled with hyper realistic images of intimacy and over processed reality. Now however, we also have creative porn mass portfolio websites are the height of this phenomena and rather than excite or encourage you, they too can make you feel hopelessly inadequate. You can see what projects you can't do and have no chance of winning. You can see how much smaller your brand is and how you don't have any big name trophy clients to list on your homepage. If we feel excited and hopeful when we first open our browser, then it can take mere minutes of browsing to make us feel the polar opposite, but only if we allow it. It's natural to want to join in, to weave your way over to the fast lane as quickly as possible. But it's a toxic race to a perpetual horizon that ultimately works against its own admittedly vague ends. Endless days and nights of work, stress and even blind panic to gather as much forward momentum as possible without realizing the implications. Your diary and workload grow in size and weight. What began as an exciting journey towards freedom can soon feel like dragging a boulder up a mountain. Things can get beyond your control. Yes, you're only doing what others have done to gain success, but are you doing it right? More importantly, is it right for you? When we dive down that rabbit hole following the aimless white rabbit, are we aware of the reality quickly zooming out of the gloom to meet us, that we are not in fact invincible? Self inflicted high workload and an equally self inflicted muddle of deadlines can do a great job of clouding our judgment and stealing our precious energy and resilience. Like success and money, creativity can be addictive, especially when we attach our deep anxieties, hopes and fears to agents that allow us to lose sight of what we are here to be make or fix. Aware of the solution, in denial of the facts, our uber connected worlds love to take a piece of information and make it go viral. A throwaway piece of content that will be forgotten as quickly as it appeared. And honestly, this is best for all concerned. Tiktoks of cute cats don't need to be elevated to the same status as The Godfather Part 2. It's enough to glance them as they whiz across our consciousness and disappear. Such content is another piece of porn hyperrealistic entertainment that stimulates our dopamine receptors in small doses. It doesn't involve spending time getting to understand a much bigger piece of storytelling with ultimately larger conclusions and rewards for the time we've invested. Time is our currency, but we spend it unwisely every hour of every day. Worse, this is something we can't solely blame ourselves for. And it's worse because something that isn't our fault is harder to change. Legions of attention Engineers have pored over research findings exploring the parts of our ancestral minds that respond to short term thinking and rewards. It's no conspiracy to state that the companies force feeding us seemingly trivial content know how to engage our brains and keep us scrolling. If they didn't, they wouldn't have businesses with billions of users, our thoughts and desires are often preoccupied with the possible future outcomes of our actions in the present moment. Yet we spend said moment engaging with elements that ultimately incinerate any positive future outcome. The irony is, however, that among the melee of micro content messages and short videos often exists a small amount of valuable information that can unlock a positive change in someone. It could be something that has been in plain sight forever, but which needed unlocking by a third party. We share more information than ever, and that includes more valuable information than ever. As a society, we know more about ourselves and each other than at any point in history, and we know how to do and make things better than any society ever has. Yet we struggle more than ever before, too. We like saying stuff, a lot of stuff, yet we don't always pay attention to what we should be hearing. We might pay rapt attention to a motivational speaker or give ourselves endless amounts of pep talks, but still nothing changes. Even when we are aware of an impending crash, we don't often do much to avoid it. No matter how many warning signs we see or read motivational quotes on the very issue, we still play down what's about to happen to us. Being aware of the solution often doesn't make us face up to the facts. All of this is part of our evolution, or lack of it, both societal and personal. For all of our sophistication, mistakes are being repeated across the ages, generation after generation. Technological advancements and innovative progress are accelerating, yet we're still grappling with basic concepts that have been known to us for thousands of years. We can share our thoughts with thousands of strangers almost instantaneously, but we can still find it hard to take just 30 seconds to sit still and appraise how we're actually feeling, let alone accept and do something about how we're actually feeling. The biggest gift you can give yourself is to watch for the signs that could take you off course. They're often easy to spot, but hard to avoid. If you become aware of the possibility of impending doom, do something about it so it never materialises. Slow down, change lanes, pull over and ask for help. Make yourself familiar with solutions that can positively influence your current issues and problems. Our journeys are littered with experiences that make us feel either 10ft tall or show us just how deep rock bottom is. And there is something important to be taken from all of them. It's not meant to be easy, but it's not meant to be impossible.