Everywhere I look around me there is advice and instructionals on how to succeed by applying yourself to "grind culture" and relentlessly pursuing goals and dreams.
While many of these have undertones of recommending that people "stay true to themselves" and "be the most themselves" they nonetheless have in common that they push us towards commonly accepted societalized goals that assume that people are all striving for pretty much the same thing.
But are we really all striving for the same thing?
I have my doubts.
While I am not pretending to except myself from having spent a life in search of some kind of deeper meaning to my existence, one of the things I have increasingly discovered as I age is that I step back from these broad based recommendations.
I look around me and I see all this social media and all these ostensible experts talking about concepts like "social currency" and "the attention economy." Whereas I recognize these as real things, the danger with them is that we lose ourselves on the road to finding meaning by sidetracking into always questing for social approval, instead of our own approval. It's everywhere!
Let me offer up a super simple microcosmic example here.
Consider our own Hive community, and the way we all are creating various kinds of content. Ask yourself — and I'm not expecting you to give me an answer here, I'm just expecting you to ask the question internally and come up with your own answer, also internally — whether you're creating content because it is something you find interesting or whether you're creating content in the hope of finding social approval — in our particular case in the form of securing the most lucrative upvotes.
As I inch closer to having been part of this experiment for nine years, there's a good chance that people would look at me and claim that I "should be more popular than I am," given my level of posting and engagement... and that my posts should be getting more rewards that they are.
As far as I'm concerned I'm in pretty much exactly the right place… that is to say, I'm in a place that represents what I am authentically experiencing at any given moment not in a place where I am trying to maximize public approval or my ostensible social currency.
Every now and then I get lucky and something I have to offer apparently strikes a chord with more than a few people and I can look at that and say "Oh well, that's kind of cool", but most of the time I live somewhere in the middle of things… possibly because what I have to say isn't necessarily popular, or because of what I was told a long time ago that people don't like to think about things too much.
I happen to enjoy thinking about things and often I think out loud and that's what ends up becoming a blog post.
Obviously, such random musings are a far cry from topics like "how to make $1,000,000 in 60 days investing in crypto."
Which reminds me of a post I read on a blog maybe 20 years ago, with the title "if this post was about sex we'd have 1,000,000 views by now!"
As I've aged I have come to spend more and more time alone, not because I'm lonely but because I recognize that my motivations and where I derive meaning tends to be out of alignment with the vast majority of the world, at least in a public sort of sense.
The interesting thing is that when in private and in personal one-on-one conversation many people actually want what I describe. But we have a fear of living without that social approval that external validation to assure us that who we are is an OK and acceptable thing.
Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2025.08.26 02:02 PST
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