Tag: instant gratification

500+ friends and yet so few friends

Posted on by philipdodson
likes by Philip Dodson
likes by Philip Dodson

We have collectively created a world where we have confused more of something to be better than less. Whatever happened to quality?

500 friends on Facebook seems amazing, wow so many friends! It’s especially amazing to a generation that grew up before Facebook, yes I am that old. We used to have maybe 5-6 friends, who we might phone or see once a week, they were typically local, not living in Australia or Bali or Venezuela. We’d often grown up with them, known their families, and went to school together.

Now we break into a mild hysterical panic if one of our ‘friends’ does not reply within minutes.

We believe we are so popular in our dopamine fueled Nirvana of ‘likes’,’hearts’, ‘Wows’ and ‘Hahas’, yet how many of the 500 are real true friends that we truly connect to and who will be there for us whatever?

Of course, social media enables us to share things and keep connected with distant friends. But it isn’t a replacement for life, as in real life.

We can get everything in an instant in our world, but real friendships aren’t created in an instant.

They are not made online.

Focus on real people, in real-time and in the physical world, not the digital one.

Easy is painful

Posted on by philipdodson

IMG_7793

It’s interesting that often by default we opt for the easy option.

Whenever things get ‘tough’ we tend to go for the instant gratification, hiding very often from our fears, even just fears of something being hard.

Perhaps something we feel we do not have the skills for the task but frightened to show that to others or admit that to ourselves.

Easy to do nothing, harder to ask for help or to learn the skill we do not have.

We think avoiding something is easy, we can then go back to our comfort zones. But as I have posted before, comfort zones could be more accurately described as discomfort zones.

Easy is appealing but then we have to live with the pain of regret, the feeling of failing, the doom of the pressure from unstarted or unfinished tasks that we perceived as hard.

It’s overcoming the fear that is hard. But doing hard things brings results and success. Like most things, it’s a choice and then a habit building exercise. Hard things are usually worth it, rewarding and meaningful.

Hard is easy once learnt, easy is always painful.