The True You Every I Is Looking For

... is hard to find in real life, but is it virtually impossible on Social Media? This world is shallow by all standards, starting with it being a 2D world dependent on two (out of twelve) senses.

I am prone to say the number one problem with a place like Steemit is that it narrows your depth of field, putting every I at 1.8 F-stop. Very sharp, but blurry backgrounds, and a hell of a lot of bokêh (that which glitters, be it gold or not - we can't tell, it's blurry).

[Pixabay]

I, too, like @thetrueyou, have noticed how nobody can walk through a department store, a library or down the street without a phone for a divining-rod. I can only presume that where a Steemian types out a fair bit of text they are not on a phone, but behind a keyboard. May that be a comforting thought! Or I could be wrong….

I only got a phone two years ago, and I mainly use if for audio-books. So far, I have only met Steemians who detest audiobooks. I have never been on facebook. I have no friends to meet there. I am past the days when I hope to meet somebody else with a mind level to mine on such a platform, that randomly.

Otherwise, I am surrounded by a lot of technology, considering.

• MP3
• Tablet
• Laptop
• Desktop
• a Naim
• a Tivoli,
• an ADL amplifier for my Bose desktop speakers,
• a Canon printer, a Canon camera, a Canon scanner (no I have no shares in Canon)
• My tv turns out to be tiny at 36 inch. My decoder seldom works properly
• My mother is borrowing my DVD player.
• I have FIVE (wow, I hadn’t counted them before!) quality headsets (my excuse is, I am going progressively deaf at a fairly young age, so I have a lot of listening to do before it is too late).
• My son has a Wii-U,
• I still have a discman,
• we both have a calculator.

But I get confused. I call my tablet a laptop, because it fits on my lap, while I always put my laptop on a table, and there isn’t much of my PC on my desk.

Stuff.

The trouble is if you don’t use all of it regularly, you can’t remember how it works, anymore. The other day I forgot how to put a number in my home telephone (15 years old). It doesn’t help that nothing comes with a manual anymore. I also find none of it “intuitive”, since I trained my intuition to work differently.

I came to the digital world late. As a hyper-sensitive being, you have to do quite some work to be able to live with all these gadgets and their electro-magnetic NOISE. After I surrendered and shut down a large part of my sensitivity, to join the modern world and study it better, I had to upgrade too fast. None of the operations give me any true sense of satisfaction. But I'm the type of woman who still does her dishes by hand and cuts my couple of square metres of lawn with a pair of scissors (not a trimmer or hedge clippers: kitchen scissors.) I also use a dustpan and brush. (I do hoover as well!)

I still prefer to burn CDs than store downloads on my NAS Drive (add that to list above!). I played casette tapes in my car till 2015 (when I got a new car, which plays music from an SD card). I have this ominous feeling I can’t shake, that a solar flare will shut everything down one day, and I want to be prepared: I could still listen to a CD on my discman, run on batteries. “Happy Days Are Here Again”, while the world grows dark and cold and we all go down together….

Woman Cleaning Garni Temple by Adam Brill

What really drives me the most to despair and makes me say “et tu, Steemit?”, is the fragmentation. Everybody does a little piece of something, puts up a tiny fragment of their lives, catering to 6 minute max attention spans. How can you ever hope to encounter anyone with a string of brief visits to a snapshot moment of their life? It reminds me of all the things that proove us to be very under-evolved as a human race (I have a long list, including schools and prisons); like GP’s who take out 10 minutes to examine only one part of your body and then prescribe any old drug (well, spanking new preferably, but still quite randomly).

You can’t have an encounter with some part or thing (you can meet with a bat or a ball, though).

I fear Steemit may be creating a false sense of community. The writers and artist may be okay, they are doing what they do anyway, only they, now, have a kind of sense of being published and read. It only goes so far, though, and only if you excell at short one paragraph stories…. This way everybody may find their niche and be entertained, but it does nothing to create a sense of cohesion.

What is the bigger picture?

Surely not to watch eachother go through life being active and doing good things, you should be doing anyway, already? There seems to be a trendy idea that we can all spur eachother on to be creative, productive and of service. Yes, we CAN HELP others (in need?). Make sure you take before and after pictures though, and post how helpful you were. No need to be anonymously charitable at home anymore. Nobody means to boast, but only to lead by example.

What can make this world a better place? Certainly, saying something nice is better than trolling, hacking, watching porn and playing violent games. But if we are meaning to help eachother feel validated, we are only successfully reaching the top 5 % of Steemians (if that) and still not making a difference to those who are in real dire straits (and not able to make it to any form of social media).

Aren’t we being a bit collectively pretentious if we aim to do anything more than hang out and scan around for things that might spark our own private missions? Which would be fine, were it that we each had a Medicin Sans Frontiers in us ... and none of us would be here.

[©@sukhasanasister]

But wait. I, too, can put the irony on hold for a moment and try to think positively. Putting yourself in service of the community is what it is all about. Join in, take part, have fun.

So what can I do?

Knowledge is my industry. Specifically in Anthroposophy. I didn’t realise that it was, before I came here, but now I do. Totally useless here, I also now know.

I also see how in just a few years (well, a decade, perhaps) I have lost many tricks of the language trade (mumbling only to myself and speaking auti-speak) and for the rest I seem to have become quite alienated from what makes a lot of people tick.

I find myself looking out for “ones to watch”, and I wait and see what they might need. But what have I to give? If you had caught me ten years earlier….or so it seemed at the time, but now, also that optimism must have been illusion, for it did little more for me than keep my head above water.

There is never a point in telling people what to think.

We all know people don’t take advice really, and they don’t come here for a TED Talk, do they?

I remind myself that my being here is a project that is ony worth my time as long as I learn something new every day, and until it becomes crystal clear where I should focus my attention on next. It is quite possible that by the end of it, when I retreat once more to my little burrow, I may feel all the more disconnected than before.

One must be careful not to over-invest in Steemit.