My advice to people, especially those who are dealing with the hardships of having to accept this and especially deal with social media and how all this stuff is now, what would be your advice just to people, a way to move forward and understand the world that we live in, what it is, and to have more of an acceptance or a reality reference point to how to move at least with their lives?
Put all your efforts, all your energy into reestablishing meaningful long-term or at least regular and repetitive connections with living, breathing, sweating human beings.
What you have online, these are not human beings, these are avatars, these are representations, they are manipulated by real human beings, but they’re not real.
Go back to reality and you go back to reality by saying good morning to your neighbor, by walking to the grocery store and chatting for a minute or two with a grocer, by climbing a bus and sitting next to someone and saying, how do you reconnect to the fabric, defy the symbolic and the abstract and the virtual and the digital and the imaginary, defy all of this, defy the fantasy, reconnect with reality and as you interact with other flesh and blood people, you will suddenly feel flesh and blood again, because right now none of us feels real.
We all feel depersonalized and derealized as though we are not inhabiting any reality and as though we don’t exist.
Today, we experience partial existence, we suspect that we may not actually exist, maybe we are a figment in someone’s imagination, it’s very unhealthy.
When you connect with other people, their gaze, the fact that you are seen, responded to gives you reality, suddenly you exist again.
Start small, start small, put a target of five interactions a day, each one, two sentences, don’t go big, don’t be grandiose, two sentences, good morning, I love you though, that’s all, walk on, move on, interact with people, gradually we’ll discover the intoxicating effect of interacting with flesh and blood people, they will, this effect dwarfs anything social media cannot feel, anything online cannot feel, that’s one piece of advice, and second piece of advice, trust judiciously, don’t be paranoid, don’t be a conspiracy theorist, don’t distrust as a matter of policy, trust as a matter of policy, but trust judiciously, learn how to trust and who to trust and never trust anyone about everything, allocate trust, you can trust some people for some things but not for others, distribute your trust, create a distributed network of trust, so that you always have a solution for a trust issue with a specific individual, create a trust network around you and then once you have this safety net of trust which you can rely on, then you can venture out safely, venture out, you take a bit more risk, you seek novelty, you can connect with strangers and make them not strangers in due time, try to avoid casualness, avoid casual sex, avoid anything casual, take your life seriously, invest in it, consider it a business proposition, you wouldn’t take your business casually or you wouldn’t have a business, and finally the last piece of advice is what I call nothingness, ask yourself which of my beliefs, which of my voices are mine and which I borrowed from someone, adopted from someone, I’m imitating someone, I’m influenced by someone, consider yourself like an onion, peel the layers, discard the layers that are not yours and remain with the essence of the onion and the essence of the onion is none of the layers, it is the smell of the onion because once you have discarded all the layers, the smell of the onion lingers, that smell is you.
Focus on the smell, focus on you, Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre called it authenticity, many of the things we do, many of the things we believe, many of the things we say, the ways we behave, people we attach to etc, this is not us.
These are voices, a mother’s voice, a father’s voice, teachers, influencers, peers, society, government and so on, discard all this.
It’s not you. It’s dead weight. It’s a burden. It falsifies you.
Discard all this. That’s what I call nothingness.
Throw away everything. Remain with three sentences but they are yours. Remain with three behaviors or three traits or three people but they are yours.
They are really you.
Remain with the smell of you.
Sam, very well put, again, I want to thank you for taking the time out, you know, you blessed us with a lot of gems today, I hope it resonates and really educates a lot of you, you know, to give you, you know, a reference point of where to start at, where to, you know, kind of come out of this, you know, sometimes that’s what we need.
We need, we just need that little pep talk to get us going.
And again, Sam, as always, it’s been a pleasure to have you on, a blessing too, thank you again and very kind of you to have me, thank you.
We’ll definitely be in contact and again, enjoy your day, everyone’s, you know, please make sure you share the video, once you get it, people definitely could benefit from this knowledge.
I’ve recorded the video, I’ll send you the recording, absolutely, okay, take care, take care, talk to you again, bye.
