Tag: social life

Your social bubble doesn’t always reflect real life:

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I’ve talked about the danger of falling down internet rabbit holes before, about how being hit on every side by really strong opinions can rewrite your thought patterns. It’s not just online though, it’s also in real life. I don’t seem to struggle with it as much in real life as I do online, but that’s only thanks to having a very interesting and complex mix of friends. But many people don’t get that variety, they hang out with their core group and they bounce all their ideas off of that core group.

This is especially true for students, even more so for college students. You find yourself completely ingulfed in your social bubble and therefore don’t venture far from that familiar comfort. There’s nothing wrong with being comfortable in your social circle and finding joy with like minds, it’s just when people from outside those like minds start feeling like others. It’s when you don’t understand how anyone could have a different viewpoint or opinion on something that it seems like everyone you know holds. It’s when you can’t understand how people form other behaviors than how your group acts in social settings.

It’s when we get tunnel vision because everything outside our normal feels abnormal, even when the actual population is split 50/50 on how to approach a problem.

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Toxic Gossip.

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You know that famous quote “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people“? I think about that quote a lot, maybe more than normal, but I think it’s true. Not because everyone who talks about people are small minded, but because the action of talking about people slowly makes you more small minded. You begin to look for things to gossip about. You begin to feed on the drama.

I’ve noticed a few people in my life fall down this rabbit hole, or perhaps they were always in it and by hanging out with them I started to trip into it as well. Regardless I noticed the need to talk about people chip away at me. It was only one or two people, but the need was still there, and no matter how those people did me wrong, it wasn’t justifiable to talk about them, because I wasn’t hurting them, I was hurting me.

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Expanding horizons: On Friendships built on Differences

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Have you ever met someone that you have nothing in common with and it bloom into a friendship? It’s an interesting situation, and I mean that in the best way, these people can help you grow and widen your horizons, but they can also just be interesting people to discuss things with.

I think we’ve lost a lot of the art of being friends with different people. We like to surround ourselves with replications of ourselves. We like to know what kind of advice we’re going to get. We like to do our hobbies with other people who like our hobbies. Even if we don’t mean them to be, our friends tend to be very similar to each other. But they don’t need to be, we can have friends from all walks of life with all sorts of different hobbies and ideals. We might not get the joy of hearing our opinions spoken back to us, but we can learn about different ideas and we can fall in love with different activities, or types of music, or books.

We grow when we’re introduced to new and exciting things, but we also are mammals completely dependent on having support systems and being loved. We can find that love in company with all sorts of people.

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The risk of falling too hard into a niche:

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We love our niches. We’ve been told to seek them out since we were kids. Find your people and everything else will fall together! And I’m not saying that our people aren’t important, in fact, they are one of the most important things in our lives. All I’m saying is that we don’t want all our people to be exactly the same, just like we don’t want all our creative work to be the same, or all our habits to stay exactly the same.

We’re human beings, we don’t make progress or grow if we just do the same things over and over again.

If you find people who are too much like you, or only enjoy work that is exactly like the work you create, you’re not going to change any. You’re not going to be pushed to grow, you’ve never going to need to step outside of your comfort zone. You’ll create a beautiful little bubble around you and you’ll never be challenged. It might sound nice in a lot of ways, but without being challenged we will never achieve more than we are now. Without being pushed outside our comfort zone we’ll never learn that we do better work there. We’ll never learn that our people weren’t helping us but holding us back. We’ll never know that we can be more.

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Staying Busy: Why you should bulk up your schedules

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] 081So I’d like to pretend like I’m one of those people who is always busy. But as a twenty-something year old I’d have to say that that’s not always true. You know the story, college kids procrastinating on tumblr, netflix, or whatever other thing, alone in our room dissolving into nothing for a few hours a day. It’s a great escape… but only every now and then. The internet likes to make itself into an extreme life style. It glamorizes staying in and an extreme form of relaxation that actually passes the line of relaxation and into the realm of wasted time.

I’m as guilty as the next girl. In high school I was on tumblr 24/7. I thought it was a great way to spend all my time because it was inspiring. Well, that’s true. Tumblr is inspiring. But for it to be considered as an inspiration in your life… it has to inspire something.

Here’s what I’m getting at: We need to get off the couch, out of bed, and do more.

Writing this last summer would have made me a hypocrite. Writing it this summer, I can say that it’s a lifestyle change that will change you for the better. Not only will you see your goals move closer and closer, but you will be naturally happier. Here’s why:

  • You’ll sleep better an sounder at night.
  • You’ll be more active, which will release more endorphin’s, which will help your health overall, give you more energy… do I need to go on?
  • You’ll feel less anxious about social plans. Social anxiety is really big in our generation. If you force yourself to get out there more often it will stop seeming like such a weight. When you’re seeing people four times a week rather than once every two weeks you’ll be able to grow stronger relationships and the activity will seem less like a burden because of that and because you’re comfort zone will shift by what you’re used too.
  • You’ll be able to grow your hobbies. Didn’t you want to learn to play the guitar? Didn’t you used to love to paint? There’s more hours in the day to do things when you’re not behind re-watching an entire TV show or scrolling endlessly.
  • You’ll learn what’s important to you on the computer. You’ll figure out which TV shows you really care enough about to stick with and if reading up on a few bloggers is more important than going through 1000.

*The picture is from an internship I did senior year of high school, hence the old school desk top*