When Sharing Swings Back

It’s a human tendency to share. Since happiness cannot be enjoyed in a vacuum, I’d like to add that this is an important tendency at that. That being said, in an absolute sense, we may be living in an environment with more socialized support for sharing than any other.

There is the obvious prevalence of social media as evidence of this, but this pendulum has swung to the extreme in more ways than posting to Facebook. We’ve normalized sharing to levels that make it rare to have a remarkable feeling or experience in the moment without sharing that moment publicly. The pendulum has swung to the point where we talk about everything we’re doing and our grand plans for the future.

Now, the natural uncertainty of life and the difficulty of the journey’s we’re on mixes with this ever fashionable sharing culture for a troubling outcome. More people than ever are talking about what they want to do and sharing who they want to be that it’s leaving little time for execution. We’re sharing the journey so much that many of us aren’t really doing anything.

Like the motion of any pendulum of human behavior, I look forward to things swinging back towards less lip service and more action. Wouldn’t it be amazing to come to find out that someone is actually more interesting than they first seemed rather than the other way around?

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach