It has been such a busy day today that I am just really getting started on my Steem work. I do see this as work even though it is much more engaging, enjoyable and perhaps important than my real job. I enjoy my real work too but, I think in the grand scheme of things, this might have more reach and impact on our futures than what many of us are doing in our day to day.
I am not just talking about value, I am talking about changing the way society views governance, economics, money, work, community, responsibility and hopefully, how empowered individuals are to actually engage and take part. I think there are a lot of people in this world who feel somewhat disenfranchised and powerless to enact change, even in themselves.
Today I was talking with a client about something some of these things including morality. We ran through some hypothetical scenarios and even the basic ones that seem innocuous, if you follow a slippery slope, can lead to some very damaging areas. That is for another day though.
This lead into responsibility though and this is something that I think is a vital part of any individual and definitely any individual within a community. Responsibility has almost become a dirty word in much of our society now as it is almost always connected to paying the consequences for poor behaviour but, it actually works both ways.
We also need to take responsibility for our positive behaviors also and sometimes that is very difficult to do, especially when there are so many excuse not to. We seem to constantly be fed ways to shirk the responsibility while feeling like we are actually taking responsibility. In the class today I used the example of Fast-food and body image.
There are so many campaigners that fight for McDonald's to introduce healthy foods and Fashion magazines to use real models but, it is quite simple to get them to change their ways or disappear if they don't. No campaign is needed, just stop going there, stop reading the news stands, stop buying from services you do not agree with. Simple.
The problem is at the moment that the way to make things go viral is to spread the negatives about it and although people seem to think that this should have an effect on the various topics, what it really does is drive more attention and traffic to the sites and the stores and gets them more support not less. I would say that this process is quite engineered, marketers are much smarter than consumers. Obviously.
Now, this is unlikely to immediately change the situation and it isn't a panacea but, it goes a long way to helping individuals take back some control and once that happens, have a chance to review and adjust other behaviors too and with enough making this simple choice, a community has formed. A community of like minds looking to improve their well-being. They may not know each other yet but, they have started a movement. Albeit, silent.
We are always looking to fix issues and of course, these things must be taken care of but, when it comes to individual health, we need to take the responsibility for ourselves first. We need to work out what we need to work out and discover what is blocking our own development and when we find it, remove it from our lives if we think it has control over us.
This is especially true of negative influences yet, this is not what we do. For the most part, we spend a great deal of energy trying to make something bad, not so bad so we can still do it and not feel guilty about it. We want McDonald's to introduce healthier menu items when, there are already healthier options available, just not at McDonald's. We want magazines to introduce different models when there are plenty of options for that too plus, what is the point of those magazines. It is not like the information in there is of any great value. So, why buy?
I think it is our guilty little secret. We want to feel bad, we want to eat junk and look at pictures of people deemed better than us so we can justify our feelings, so we can have a target to blame. Turn it off, cut it out and then look into the mirror and take responsibility.
I wonder what the world would look like if one could by a pair of augmented reality glasses that would censor the world. Perhaps it could be set to put a black bar over all the possible advertising or, perhaps it would replace it with alternative text and images that empowered people rather than deflated.
At the end of the day, the power is ours, the first step is realizing we must change before the world.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]