You only do things so others can see, not so you can enjoy

Meditation teachers often give a warning to their new students.

For the first year of your practice, don’t tell anyone you’re doing it. If you feel the need to tell others you’re meditating and how much it’s changing your life, then you’re missing the point.

That warning makes me so happy. It’s exactly the approach we should take to personal growth.

Because if the work we’re doing on ourselves is having a real impact, then people will know. Authentic growth will communicate itself organically through our actions with others. We don’t need to ask.

Unfortunately, the guru’s warning doesn’t sit well with our culture. Good luck convincing anyone to keep anything to themselves these days, as digital technology companies have long since convinced us that we need to broadcast every single one of our life choices along with its relevant hashtag and social movement, all over the internet, multiple times a day, until we die.

Internet pioneers took the smartest engineers in the world and built the freest, most addictive dopamine dispenser in the world, and then disguised it as the modern scrapbook that helps people satisfy the craving for proof that their lives matter.

And as a result, now we’re all just performing our identities for each other, all the time.

Otherwise we’re merely trees in the forest falling unwitnessed, right?

But this trend is not new. Goffman researched this psychological behavior back in the sixties. In his book about the presentation of self in everyday life, the term he used was identity performance.

Meaning, who we are becomes a project or a conscious effort or action taken to present ourselves a certain way in social interactions. It’s interpersonal theater. Somebody plays the role of the audience, which an individual must perform to impress.

Totally human, totally understandable. We all do it.

But here’s the problem. There is no audience anymore. Nobody listens anymore, because everybody is too busy putting on a show. It’s all broadcast with no reception. We’re all just winking in the dark.

Shakespeare had no idea how accurate he was when he wrote, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

That’s what we’ve turned into. An entire culture of actors who only do things so others can see, not so they can enjoy.

Here’s a heartbreaking story that proves my point. This was the moment that convinced me our culture had officially jumped the shark.

Years ago my wife’s friend, a chef who runs a small soup shop, asked us to work her booth at the food hall one afternoon while she took care of a family emergency.

No problem, sounded fun. We always wondered what it would be like to be a vendor at one of those places.

There was only one problem. Our booth was located directly across the aisle from a sweets vendor who sold the most ridiculous desert known to man.

A gigantic waffle cone with a peanut butter glaze, filled with scoops of cookie dough, sprinkled with vintage cereal crumbles, and two graham cracker sticks with fried marshmallow cubes, served inside of a plastic baseball hat.

People were contracting diabetes just by looking at it.

But the truly sad part was not how outrageously unhealthy the snack was. Or that most of the food hall’s customers walked right past our soup station and chose our competitor.

What broke my heart was, every single person who bought one of the treats immediately spent a minimum of five minutes posing for a picture of themselves with their food. Which they immediately shared online.

It wasn’t dessert, it was a trophy. It was proof of their existence, coolness, adventurousness, freedom, whatever. People couldn’t have cared less about actually enjoying this narcotic of a dessert, because they were too busy getting hits of dopamine from strangers on the internet watching them stand next to it.

We even watched a few people take a bite or two of the cone, and then throw it away.

Eighteen dollars, well spent.

What happened to our species? When did we decide to value other people’s approval and attention more than our own joy and growth?

Look, just because all the world’s a stage, doesn’t mean we need to take the spotlight.

The most important growth happens in the dark. Not everybody needs to know how consciously you’re living your life.

Just live the damn thing, and let your actions speak for you. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
If ten thousand people aren’t applauding for you, do you feel worthless?