Was 2018 Really as Bad as Social Media Makes It Sound?

Thoughts for a Better New Year

Has 2018 really been as bad as the Facebook memes would have you think? Would we all be enraged against each other if the media weren’t telling us that we should be?

Did you lose your job, your home, did a loved one die? If that is true for you then yes, you had a bad year and I hope that next year is better for you. 

The vast majority of us though are only being told that 2018 was bad and that 2019 will only be worse and it’s all because your neighbor stands for everything that you are supposed to stand against. The reality is that most of us enjoyed a safe home, friends, family and health, which is as much as any of us should wish for. 2018 for nearly all of us has been a pretty good year.

All of the suffering and hardship from around the world that we have pushed to the front of our social consciousness through social media has existed since the dawn of time and will continue until we are all dust. The only difference is that it wasn’t visible in the palm of our hand every 90 seconds (how often most people check their phone).

Social media and instant broadcast have connected us with the world and the world with us like never before in human history. Unfortunately this connection to the world is controlled by the media and entertainment industries who make their profits from advertisers who pay for viewership. Viewership is increased by inflaming people’s emotions. The more emotionally enraging a topic, the more people watch, the more people watch, the more advertisers pay for screen or air time.  The best way to inflame emotions is to create an enemy. A single social enemy can be quickly defeated and no longer profitable. 

The perfect enemy is a diametric social division; enter the “liberals vs conservatives”. This is a right brain – left brain division that equally occupies 50% of any given human population. The media has told us that the two cannot coexist and one must violently eradicate the other in order to create peace. The most malleable among us are acting on this call to violence which creates more emotionally inflammatory stories which sell more advertising space, which enrages everyone further, thus deepening the division that the media has created in order to sell more advertising space.

The reality is that the vast majority of us occupy the massive grey space between hard line liberal and hard line conservative. However the media industry is insisting that we must each pick a polarized side and fight to the death for their own profits.

I would like to encourage each of us to think critically about the information that is force fed to us each and every minute. Before you form an emotionally charged opinion or look at your neighbor as the representative enemy of social wrongs, be sure that you are not being manipulated by the author or creator of that information. 

Ask yourself, is this information based in actual and complete facts or is it opinion / comedy dressed up as news? What information is missing and why was it excluded? Is the information presented in such a specific way as to enrage your emotions?

Finally, forgiveness and understanding is the key to happiness. Often the only one who really requires forgiveness and understanding is yourself.