Social Media Looking Glass

1.    “Your life is the sum of what you focus on…If you paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different” Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, 1-2. 1.

I think in all of our lives we have gotten caught up in the world around us and forgot who we were. This is especially true today with social media. As human beings, it’s our instinct to constantly want the attention of others. When we don’t get that attention, we start to get down on ourselves.

Gallagher states “Life is the sum of what you focus on..”, a statement that rings true in today society more than ever. With the advancement of social media and our need for attention, we turn to areas, interests, and groups that may not be the best for pushing us beyond our limits, but that make us feel good about ourselves. If we focus on the negative in the world, all we will see is bad everywhere we go, and vise versa. Myself on a positive note, when I read a happy story about giving back, its more encouraging for me to go do something helpful in my community.

Now Gallagher’s statement finishes with “If you paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different.” The rest of his statement is very impactful. We truly don’t know anything else besides what we focus on every day. Social media has gotten so good at tuning to our specific interest that we don’t see other parts of the news, latest happenings, or issues of the world. We get sucked into a bubble and it allows for our opinions to become so strong about what we see that we’re so ignorant about other issues happening in the world.

Gallagher’s statement is so true, we focus only on what we see and we believe that is the truth. Social Media has really gotten this focus to where it’s at today.