A week or so ago, I heard a compelling CBC radio interview with Payam Akhavan.
He is a renowned United Nations prosecutor and human rights scholar and his 2017 CBC Massey Lectures, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey, is, to quote the CBC website, ‘a powerful survey of some of the major human rights struggles of our times — and what we can do about it.’
The radio interview was profound and thought-provoking, Akhavan is brilliant and inspiring, and the Massey Lectures are well worth the time spent listening. But one particular sentence of his stayed with me: “We live in a culture that celebrates greed and narcissism.”
If Akhaven is right, and I think he is, nowhere is the celebration he speaks of more evident than on our social media feeds. It saddens me to say this, as I, like others with time and access, spend many of life’s precious minutes online.
While I love scrolling my Instagram feed looking at beautiful pictures, or checking in on friends and family members on Facebook, I am acutely aware that more often than not, the experience leaves me disheartened.
My friend Christina Crook, author of The Joy of Missing Out, Finding Balance in a Wired World in a chapter on Quitting the Comparison Game, has this to say about humans: “We are a competitive tribe, ever hungering for more: more prestige, more comfort, more money.”
We compare ourselves to others. We always have. This is not news, but as Crook points out, we used to compare ourselves to people we knew within our circles of friends and family. Now, we can compare ourselves to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook.
In social media feeds, we amplify our successes, posting well-crafted glimpses of the most perfect aspects of our lives and creating a celebrity culture measured, not by compassion or contribution, but by an ever increasing number of fans, followers, likes and comments. We feed our greed, and we are left hungry.
What suffers is our satisfaction with our ordinary lives. Our perspective becomes warped by comparison, and we fail to remember that we enjoy an abundance of healthy food, a warm place to live, excellent health care, and clean water.
We lack appreciation for the many gifts in our day-to-day lives and start to perceive ourselves as marginalized or inadequate. In this narrowing view, it becomes harder to extend generosity and compassion to others.
Scrolling the feeds, I am looking for another kind of measure, one that validates kindness, empathy and selflessness.
Our personal posts are points of influence.
Use them well.
