Our children have forgotten how to play. And so they turn into part of this shallow society. Photo: Pexels
This week I was trying to take my own advice (see my advice here 😉 ) and prove to myself that I have depth and character and that I know myself, that there are things to know about myself. I wrote in my diary, like I also advised you to do, haha.
And when I was done, and when I reread what I wrote, I had an uneasy realization. I always tried to present myself as someone who loves to read, likes old music and movies, and animals and nature, and learns languages, and informs herself about how the world works, and on topics beyond how we see the world.
Why you were more of a person as a child
But in that diary, I was able to write in great detail about my younger self, about the child I used to be. I remembered how I felt in certain situations and why, what I did when I was playing outside, how I was meeting other kids, my favorite color, and animal, and flower, and Disney princess and so many more things.
When I then tried to write in the same amount of detail about my current self I could only come up with a few books I read recently, and places I traveled to, and things I achieved.
The more we achieve, the more we lose ourselves
And I thought to myself, when we get older, we don’t live anymore to have fun and enjoy ourselves. We only live to achieve things. We go to school and uni to get a job and make money. And we go to the gym to be healthy, not to enjoy a sport we consider as being fun. We read non-fiction books to learn something, and not romance books like we used to – to enjoy ourselves.
Life has more and more become about achieving things, about proving to ourselves and others that we were able to do something.
Enjoyment or just getting stuff done?
I realized that I started new hobbies to prove to myself that I can do stuff, that I take an interest in activities, that I like to learn and see and experience new things. But do we do that because we are someone or do we do those things to try to become someone?
I remember that I read on Medium a while back that modern poetry is really bad. And I thought ‘ok, that might be the writers opinion’. And then someone commented ‘what do you expect? A shallow society makes shallow art’. And I thought to myself, they are right!
How our addictions take away from our lives
So many people nowadays have addictions. We crave quick fixes to fill holes in our lives, we spend so much time on social media, we eat shitty food, we care mostly about money and work and we don’t do much when we come home. We either watch some Netflix or scroll some more.
I learned that our attention span has dropped to 7 freaking seconds. Kids are deprived of their play time which is crucial in raising healthy kids. It makes me sick to see how parents give them an iPad instead to not have to deal with them.
On the weekends we drink and party. We prefer to have hookups rather than meaningful connections and intimacy. We find our next date on an app, as if we were shopping for shoes, and ghost them if they’re not as perfect as they seemed online.
We lack purpose and dedication
I don’t see people dedicating themselves to something anymore. I don’t see people just sitting in silence on a bus. We crave happiness so much that we scroll for hours, looking for the dopamine we are lacking, instead of having real-life conversations and something to do. Have we really become such a shallow society?
I read that on a blog, paragraphs shouldn’t be longer than three or four lines, because people don’t have the attention span and the discipline to read more than that. And look at me, contributing to that.
Slowly, we are losing our abilities. Some influencers earn more than people with degrees and working-hard-mentalities. People don’t read anymore, they don’t write each other anymore. We don’t meet up outside anymore, instead we prefer to go to a club, drink alcohol and hook up.
On an endless journey of trying to become someone
I think it’s sad. And like that diary entry has shown me, and as I’m pushing myself, I want to push you too, to please make something more of yourself. We all have so much potential, we all have creational power. We could have so many real-life connections. There is so much knowledge and creativity and inspiration out there.
I feel like it’s especially tragic because from a spirituality point of view, we come to this earth to make experiences and live a live rich in passions and purpose, full of depth. Let’s not let that get to waste.
We have forgotten what makes us truly happy. But a bit of discipline, a bit of curiosity, a bit of purpose and a bit of that feeling that you deserve better than what you have been giving yourself so far, can help you create a magical life.
We lost depth as a society, that’s a fact. But we can all contribute to living a life that’s a little bit better lived. Please play your part. And I ask you to share your opinion with me. I love people who have opinions 🙂 !
Love, Valentina <3
Written by Valentina – spiritual writer & founder of Valentina’s Diary
