WHEN GROWN PEOPLE START ACTING LIKE CHILDREN
There’s something increasingly disturbing about the way grown adults are behaving online, and I don’t think we should ignore it simply because this behavior has become common. We’re talking about people who have lived long enough to know better, people with families, jobs, responsibilities, relationships, and decades of life experience behind them, yet many of them are spending enormous portions of their days attacking strangers, monitoring other people’s lives, fighting over personalities, and becoming emotionally consumed by situations that have absolutely nothing to do with improving their own circumstances. What makes the situation even more complicated is that this behavior can now become profitable because arguments, insults, reactions, personal conflicts, and public humiliation can generate views, comments, followers, and money. We’ve reached a point where dysfunction can become entertainment and attention can become a business model.
I’ve watched the internet evolve for decades, and the transformation has been extraordinary. When I first became involved with the online world, it wasn’t anything like the environment we’re living in now. There were no smartphones constantly recording us, no endless livestreams, no algorithm continuously placing personalized material in front of us, and no expectation that everybody should document every aspect of their existence for public consumption. People participated in conversations without necessarily knowing what the other person looked like, and there was a certain distance between the individual and the technology that allowed people to communicate without constantly performing for an audience.
Today, we’re living inside an entirely different digital environment. Almost everybody has a camera, a microphone, an audience, and a broadcasting platform sitting inside their pocket. We can livestream from practically anywhere, document our meals, expose our relationships, broadcast our arguments, announce our political opinions, display our accomplishments, reveal our personal problems, and allow strangers to watch portions of our lives in real time. Technology has given ordinary people capabilities that previous generations could hardly imagine, but with that tremendous power comes an equally important question: What are we doing to our minds by constantly exposing ourselves to this environment?
The problem isn’t simply that people are spending time online. The deeper issue is what they’re consuming while they’re there, what they’re allowing into their minds, what they’re permitting to control their emotions, and how much of their precious time they’re surrendering to people and situations they have absolutely no ability to influence. We have access to more information than any generation before us, yet the sheer volume of material coming at us can become so overwhelming that valuable information gets buried beneath gossip, outrage, arguments, distractions, and nonsense. That’s where the slippery slope begins.
FROM FACELESS CONVERSATIONS TO A WORLD THAT NEVER STOPS WATCHING
I remember when online communication was much more limited and, in some ways, much more mysterious. You could enter a chat room and identify yourself by your age, sex, and general location, but nobody necessarily knew what you looked like. If you were forty years old and living in Florida, you might identify yourself that way and discover that someone else in the conversation lived nearby. From there, people could discuss current events, local activities, interests, or whatever subject the particular room was designed around. There was something fascinating about being able to communicate with people without immediately exposing your entire physical identity and personal life to them.
Even the trolling was different because there was a certain psychological distance involved. People could insult one another, joke around, provoke each other, or cause trouble, but the person on the other side of the screen remained largely faceless. You weren’t watching their family. You weren’t seeing their house. You weren’t following their daily routine. You weren’t watching them eat breakfast, argue with their spouse, walk through a supermarket, or announce what they were doing every hour of the day. The technology simply didn’t provide that level of access.
Then everything changed. Smartphones became powerful cameras, social media platforms became enormous, video became easy to produce and distribute, and livestreaming became an ordinary part of everyday communication. Suddenly, practically everybody could become a broadcaster without needing a television station, newspaper, production company, radio studio, or traditional media organization. A person could sit in a bedroom, basement, garage, office, or backyard, turn on a phone, and potentially communicate with people thousands of miles away.
There’s tremendous value in that development because people can now teach themselves skills, publish their thoughts, display their artwork, share information, build businesses, communicate across cultures, and tell stories without waiting for somebody else to give them permission. A person with something meaningful to say can find an audience without going through traditional gatekeepers. That part of the technological revolution is extraordinary. But there’s another side to it that deserves equal attention because when everybody has a microphone, everybody doesn’t automatically have something meaningful to say, and when everybody can broadcast, everybody doesn’t necessarily understand the responsibility that comes with being heard.
WHEN ATTENTION BECOMES THE DRUG
One of the biggest changes I’ve watched develop is the enormous hunger for attention. People don’t simply want to communicate anymore. Many people want to be noticed, validated, recognized, praised, discussed, followed, and constantly reassured that somebody is watching them. For some people, attention has become a psychological form of currency, and the more they receive, the more important and valuable they begin to feel.
That creates an extremely powerful cycle because controversy gets attention, anger gets attention, arguments get attention, shock gets attention, sexualized content gets attention, and personal conflict gets attention. A thoughtful presentation might require patience before an audience develops, while somebody creating an outrageous argument can sometimes generate thousands of reactions almost immediately. The internet can therefore teach people a dangerous lesson: being provocative may be more profitable than being thoughtful.
Once that lesson becomes internalized, people can begin performing instead of living. They become more extreme because moderation doesn’t create the same reaction. They reveal more because privacy doesn’t produce the same engagement. They provoke people because peaceful conversation doesn’t generate the same level of excitement. Eventually, a person can reach a point where they don’t even know whether they’re expressing their authentic personality or simply giving the audience the version of themselves that receives the strongest reaction.
That’s when attention becomes dangerous. If a stranger can say something online and completely ruin your emotional state for the rest of the day, then that stranger has gained access to something that belongs to you. They’ve gained access to your peace, your concentration, your time, and your emotional energy, and you’ve given them that access without them ever having to earn it.
YOUR CIRCLE OF CONCERN AND YOUR CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE
There’s an important distinction that more people need to understand because it can completely change the way we use our time: the difference between our circle of concern and our circle of influence. Your circle of influence contains the things you can actually affect. Your habits are inside it, your work is inside it, your relationships are inside it, your education is inside it, your creativity is inside it, your household is inside it, and your personal decisions are inside it. Those are areas where your choices can produce direct results.
Your circle of concern is much larger because it contains everything you care about but cannot necessarily control. You can care about politics, international conflicts, celebrities, economic conditions, cultural disagreements, social problems, and thousands of other things without having the ability to personally change them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them. It means you have to understand the difference between caring about something and allowing that thing to consume your life.
That distinction becomes extremely important when dealing with social media because you can spend hours arguing about a political figure you’ve never met, defending a political party that doesn’t know you exist, or attacking somebody because they support a position you disagree with, while the things inside your own circle of influence remain untouched. Your projects remain unfinished, your books remain unread, your skills remain undeveloped, your relationships remain neglected, and your own life remains exactly where it was before you picked up the phone.
You can’t control everything happening in the world, but you can control what you do with today. Today is where your power exists. Today is where you can learn something, create something, repair something, improve something, or change something within your reach. That’s why understanding the difference between concern and influence can protect you from wasting enormous amounts of energy on situations where your involvement produces nothing except frustration.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA WHIRLPOOL
Social media can become a whirlpool because every piece of content seems to lead directly into another piece of content. You watch one video and somebody responds to it. Someone else responds to that response. Another person searches through years of somebody’s history and finds something else to criticize. Somebody creates another reaction, somebody attacks the reaction, and eventually the comment section becomes another battlefield. Before you realize what has happened, hours have disappeared.
The frightening part is that this process doesn’t always feel like wasted time while it’s happening. Your mind is engaged, your emotions are moving, your fingers are typing, and you’re constantly receiving new information, so it can feel as though you’re being productive. But mental activity isn’t necessarily productive activity. Being emotionally stimulated doesn’t mean you’re accomplishing something, and being busy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re moving forward.
That’s how years can disappear without people recognizing what happened. You can become so involved in watching everybody else that you eventually lose track of your own life. You know what strangers are doing every day, you know who is fighting with whom, you know who broke up with whom, you know who insulted somebody else, and you know what controversy is happening across the internet, but you may not know what you’re doing with your own potential. You can become an expert on everybody else’s problems while remaining unfamiliar with your own.
Time doesn’t stop while you’re distracted. It continues moving whether you’re paying attention to it or not, and eventually you have to look back and ask yourself where those years went. That’s when the question becomes much bigger than social media because it becomes a question about what you chose to do with your life.
THE HIGHLIGHT REEL ISN’T THE WHOLE LIFE
Another major problem with social media is the distorted picture of reality it creates. Most people don’t present their entire lives online. They present selections from their lives. They choose the photograph, the angle, the lighting, the caption, the moment, and the story they want you to see, while everything that doesn’t fit the presentation can remain hidden.
That means you can spend your entire day comparing your real life to somebody else’s edited presentation. You might be looking at somebody’s vacation while you’re going through your most difficult period. You might be watching someone celebrate while you’re dealing with disappointment. You might be looking at somebody’s relationship while you’re experiencing loneliness. You might be watching somebody display success without knowing anything about the years of struggle that came before it.
The result can be an enormous amount of unnecessary psychological pressure. People begin believing they’re falling behind because somebody else appears to be moving forward. They start believing they aren’t attractive enough, successful enough, wealthy enough, popular enough, or interesting enough. But you can’t compare your complete life to somebody else’s carefully selected moments and expect that comparison to give you an accurate understanding of reality.
You’re not seeing the whole story. You’re seeing what somebody decided to show you.
THE MASK PEOPLE WEAR ONLINE
The internet also gives people tremendous opportunities to construct identities that may have very little connection to who they actually are in everyday life. Someone can appear incredibly confident while being deeply insecure. Someone can present themselves as morally superior while privately behaving in ways that contradict everything they claim to believe. Someone can appear wealthy while struggling financially, or appear completely happy while dealing with problems they would never reveal publicly.
That doesn’t mean everyone online is fake, and it doesn’t mean every public presentation is dishonest. It means we have to understand that presentation and reality aren’t always identical. Human beings have always had different sides of themselves, but social media has given those different sides an enormous stage on which to perform.
People can hide behind avatars, anonymous accounts, alternate identities, and carefully constructed profiles. They can say things they might never have the courage to say face-to-face because the screen provides psychological distance. Sometimes that distance brings out jealousy, resentment, prejudice, insecurity, obsession, anger, and other characteristics that people have spent years hiding from the world.
Social media didn’t create those characteristics. Human beings have always carried them. What social media has done is give those characteristics a microphone and, in some cases, an audience large enough to reward them.
WE HAVE A SMARTPHONE, BUT ARE WE USING OUR MINDS?
There’s something almost ironic about calling these devices smartphones when you look at how some people choose to use them. We have libraries in our pockets. We have access to books, research, documentaries, lectures, language courses, historical records, scientific information, educational material, and people from cultures all over the world. We have access to an extraordinary amount of knowledge, and we can reach much of it within seconds.
Yet many people use these remarkable devices primarily to consume gossip, arguments, outrage, sexualized content, recycled opinions, and endless entertainment. The technology itself isn’t making us stupid. Our choices can make us intellectually lazy. The same phone that can teach somebody a new language can also consume five hours of their day. The same device that can help somebody build a business can keep another person trapped inside somebody else’s drama. The same internet that can introduce us to brilliant thinkers can also expose us to an endless stream of meaningless noise.
The difference comes down to what we choose to feed ourselves. A smartphone can become a library, a classroom, a research laboratory, a communication system, a creative studio, or an endless amusement park. The device doesn’t make that decision for us. We do.
WE HAVE TO PROTECT OUR MENTAL ENVIRONMENT
People will protect their homes from things they don’t want inside them, but many people don’t think about protecting their minds with the same seriousness. They’ll allow practically anything into their mental environment. Every argument gets watched. Every notification gets checked. Every controversy gets investigated. Every provocative image gets consumed. Every insult gets answered. Then they wonder why they feel mentally exhausted.
You have to become selective about what you allow into your head because everything you consume leaves some kind of impression. Not every argument deserves your response, not every person deserves access to you, not every notification deserves your attention, and not every controversy deserves your emotional energy. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is close the application and return to your own life before another hour disappears.
There’s nothing weak about refusing to participate in nonsense. Sometimes walking away is evidence that you finally understand the value of your time. You don’t have to prove your intelligence by winning an argument with somebody who has no interest in understanding you. You don’t have to respond to every insult. You don’t have to explain yourself to everybody. You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to.
THE ART OF CONVERSATION IS DISAPPEARING
Something else that has suffered in this environment is the art of conversation. Real conversation requires substance, curiosity, listening, experience, observation, and thought. You have to have something to bring into the room, whether that’s a story, an idea, something you learned, somewhere you traveled, a book you read, a question you’re trying to answer, or an experience that changed the way you see the world.
Too many conversations now consist of recycled internet material. Somebody sends a video, someone else sends a meme, somebody forwards something provocative, another person sends something sexual, and everybody moves on to the next distraction. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but when entertainment becomes the foundation of communication, the depth of the conversation begins to disappear.
If you want to have something relevant to say, you have to remain curious. You have to read, absorb, research, ask questions, observe people, experience life, and continue learning. You can’t expect your mind to produce substance if you constantly feed it empty material. What goes into your mind eventually influences what comes out of your mouth.
EDUCATION AND INTELLIGENCE AREN’T THE SAME THING
There’s another distinction that deserves attention because people often confuse education with intelligence. A person can have multiple degrees and still lack wisdom, common sense, independent thought, or practical ability. At the same time, somebody who never attended college can possess tremendous intelligence, creativity, discipline, motivation, and practical understanding. Formal education has value, but education and intelligence aren’t identical.
Learning shouldn’t end when formal schooling ends. In many ways, that’s when the responsibility for your education becomes even greater because you’re now responsible for deciding what you want to understand. You can study history because you’re curious. You can learn another language because you want to communicate with people from another culture. You can study technology because you want to understand the world changing around you. You can read psychology because you want to understand human behavior. You can learn how to build something because you want to become more self-sufficient.
There’s always another level of understanding available if you’re willing to pursue it. That’s what makes life exciting. You don’t have to know everything today. You simply have to remain willing to learn tomorrow.
STOP BUILDING A MASK AND START BUILDING YOURSELF
The pressure to perform online has become enormous. People want to look successful, wealthy, attractive, intelligent, powerful, desirable, connected, and happy, but what happens when we spend so much time constructing the image that we neglect the person underneath it? What happens when looking impressive becomes more important than becoming better?
Instead of constantly trying to appear intelligent, learn something. Instead of trying to look successful, build something. Instead of constantly demanding attention, become useful. Instead of trying to convince everyone that you’re special, understand that every human being is already unique. You don’t have to manufacture uniqueness because you already possess it.
The real challenge is developing that uniqueness. That requires self-awareness, discipline, curiosity, patience, and the willingness to grow without constantly needing applause. There’s a tremendous difference between being admired and being developed. One depends on other people’s reactions, while the other depends on what you’re doing inside yourself.
DON’T LET ANYBODY TAKE YOUR LIGHT
Human beings are naturally different, and that difference should be protected rather than suppressed. Even people who look alike don’t experience life in exactly the same way. We have different memories, different personalities, different talents, different struggles, different histories, and different ways of interpreting the world.
The goal shouldn’t be to become a copy of somebody else. The goal should be to become more comfortable with who you are while continuing to develop. That also means learning how to accept change because you aren’t always going to look the way you looked twenty years ago, you aren’t always going to have the same energy, and you aren’t always going to have the same circumstances. That’s simply part of being alive.
The real victory is being able to look at yourself at every stage of life and recognize that you’re still here, still learning, still experiencing, and still capable of becoming something you haven’t been before. That’s far more valuable than desperately trying to preserve an image that belonged to another period of your life.
REAL POWER ISN’T A FOLLOWER COUNT
There’s nothing wrong with having a large audience, and there’s nothing wrong with appreciating recognition when people respond positively to your work. But numbers alone don’t tell you what kind of influence you’re having. A person can have millions of followers and still contribute very little to the development of the people watching them.
The deeper question is what you do with the attention you receive. Are you helping somebody think? Are you teaching something useful? Are you encouraging somebody to improve? Are you motivating people to create? Are you helping people become more unified? Are you leaving something behind that has value after the algorithm has moved on to something else?
That’s a much deeper form of influence than simply watching a number increase on a screen. Attention comes and goes, trends disappear, algorithms change, platforms rise and fall, but something you genuinely teach another human being can remain with them for years.
STOP WASTING YOUR LIFE ON BATTLES THAT DON’T BELONG TO YOU
Time is one resource nobody gets back. Once an hour disappears, it’s gone. Once a day disappears, it’s gone. Once a year disappears, it’s gone. That makes it difficult to understand why anyone would willingly spend enormous portions of their life fighting with people they don’t know and probably will never meet.
You can disagree with somebody without turning them into an enemy. You can have strong opinions without allowing those opinions to dominate your emotional life. You can care about an issue without allowing every argument surrounding that issue to consume you. There are too many things within your own reach that deserve your energy, including skills you can learn, books you can read, places you can visit, relationships you can strengthen, projects you can complete, and parts of yourself that still need development.
That’s where your energy belongs. The world has enough people trying to control everybody else. What we need are more people willing to take responsibility for controlling themselves.
LET PEOPLE DEVELOP AT THEIR OWN PACE
One of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that everybody has to mature according to our timetable. Some people develop early, while others develop later. Some people spend decades making mistakes before finally understanding something that might seem obvious to someone else. That doesn’t mean their story is over, and it certainly doesn’t mean they should be permanently defined by the person they were ten or twenty years earlier.
People need room to learn, room to grow, and room to make mistakes. We’re all developing at different rates, and life isn’t a competition where everybody has to arrive at the same destination at the same time. You can share what you’ve learned without demanding that another person immediately adopt your entire worldview. Sometimes the most mature thing you can do is allow another person to walk their own road while you continue walking yours.
GET BACK INTO LIFE
There’s an entire world outside the screen, and sometimes you have to put the phone down long enough to remember that life is happening around you. There are mountains to see, places to visit, cultures to experience, people to meet, books to read, meals to enjoy, conversations to have, creative projects to pursue, and quiet moments that cannot be replaced by another notification.
The world existed before the algorithm. It existed before the comment section. It existed before the notification. It existed before everybody carried a camera in their pocket, and it will continue existing after we close the application. That’s why the smartphone should remain a tool rather than becoming the center of our existence.
Use the technology. Learn from it. Create with it. Communicate through it. Research with it. But don’t allow it to become the environment in which your entire life takes place.
THE REAL BATTLE IS FOR YOUR ATTENTION
At the end of the day, I don’t think the conversation should simply be reduced to whether social media is good or bad because it’s much more complicated than that. Social media can educate you, connect you, inspire you, entertain you, expose you to different cultures, and introduce you to ideas you might never encounter otherwise. But it can also distract you, provoke you, consume your time, amplify your insecurities, and pull you into conflicts that have absolutely nothing to do with your personal development.
The real question is whether you control your attention or whether your attention controls you. That matters because wherever your attention goes, your time follows, and wherever your time goes, your life follows. Your attention is therefore one of the most valuable things you possess, and giving it away carelessly means giving away pieces of your life that you’re never going to get back.
THE CHOICE IS STILL OURS
We have more information available to us than any generation before us, but information alone doesn’t make us wiser. Wisdom comes from what we do with what we learn. It comes from questioning, observing, experiencing, reflecting, and applying knowledge to our lives. We have libraries in our pockets and universities at our fingertips, but none of that matters if we continually choose the most empty and destructive material available to us. Technology gives us possibilities, but we still have to decide which possibilities deserve our attention.
There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, laughter, relaxation, controversy, or enjoying some of the foolishness that comes with being human. Life needs balance. The problem begins when entertainment becomes our primary mental diet, when outrage becomes our favorite form of stimulation, and when performance becomes so important that simply being ourselves begins to feel uncomfortable. If everything becomes distraction, substance eventually starts feeling boring, and when everything becomes outrage, peace can start feeling strange.
That’s why we have to learn how to protect our attention. Not every argument deserves our participation, not every person deserves access to our emotions, and not every notification deserves an immediate response. Sometimes walking away isn’t weakness. Sometimes it’s wisdom. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is recognize that a particular conversation isn’t taking you anywhere and simply refuse to waste another hour trying to prove yourself to somebody who has already decided what they want to believe.
Life is too short to spend it constantly performing for people who don’t really know you. Build something. Learn something. Read something. Travel somewhere. Create something. Have conversations that actually mean something. Develop yourself privately instead of constantly trying to convince the public that you’re somebody worth noticing, because when the audience disappears, when the numbers stop moving, and when the screen goes dark, you still have to live with yourself.
That’s why I keep coming back to the same realization: human nature never ceases to amaze me. Social media didn’t create our insecurities, jealousy, vanity, anger, loneliness, or hunger for attention, but it has given all of those things a massive stage. We can now watch human behavior unfold in real time, every day, across the entire world, and that gives us an opportunity to examine not only other people but ourselves. The question isn’t whether human beings are going to be imperfect because we are. The question is whether we’re willing to recognize what we’re doing and make better choices. I know what I want to do with the time I have left, and that’s to keep learning, keep creating, keep traveling, keep observing, keep experiencing life, and keep developing myself instead of becoming trapped inside somebody else’s argument. There’s too much life left to live, too much to learn, and too much to experience to spend it staring into a screen waiting for somebody else to give me a reason to be angry. On to the next one.
