Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 348 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! Hello to all my old friends out there and welcome to my new ones. Thank you for being here and listening and sharing……You guys are the best.
Sometimes in life we make a big decision and then we want to confirm that we made the right decision so we go to the internet and we google other people who made that same decision just to get support. Now here’s the funny thing. Once we have made a decision, or if we know the decision we really want to make, we generally are going to only search out articles that are favorable to that decision because we want confirmation that we are right. Sometimes we do it so much that we even get to the point where we are uncomfortable even reading what the other side of the story is, we like our viewpoint thank you very much, we almost become intolerant to other ideas about it. But what’s that doing to us? In episode 346 I told you I was going to be talking again about being a free thinker. It’s so important!
When I was first pulling away from the religion of my family, I was wanting to confirm somehow I was making the right choice. It wasn’t good enough that I knew in my heart it was right. I felt I needed support. It felt very right to me but we like to have other people agree don’t we? Of course we do. It feels good to have other people agree with you.
So I read other people’s experiences and I got on websites that supported leaving and for a few days I did this. But what I realized is this…The more I read and focused on it the worse I felt. Sure other people agreed it was awful and their experience was awful and my friends that I would talk to agreed poor me. There was no end to the support I could find of why of course I should feel miserable because that’s a rotten deal.
And in the back of my mind my guidance system just kept saying “careful..”. My gut kept tugging me away from focusing on other peoples stories and other peoples opinions. My inner guidance system kept telling me that I was on the right path to follow my heart but getting everyone else’s input was hurting me. I was on a journey to feel good but I kept putting a stick in my own bicycle tire every time I read someone else’s miserable story just like mine. It wasn’t making me feel better it was making me bitter. It was making me feel like I was a victim and poor me. It was causing me to push myself even further away from my family that is still in the religion and I don’t want that.
The internet is full of people that will agree with you or vehemently disagree with you. Whichever one you want you can find it.
We all know that’s true. Perfect example of that was during Covid with the vaccines. Whether you got it or not, Half the country thought you were a murderer if you didn’t take it and the other half thought you were an idiot if you did take it. And the more you looked at it the more information they would send to you about it. And the algorithm wasn’t designed to give you just any information about the vaccine, it gave you exactly what you wanted to see which was not the objective other side of the story information, it was the kind that affirms what you already think. So now you’re not becoming more open, you’re becoming more closed minded.
That’s how it is with everything. Think about it. If you voted for the president of the United States and you read all the articles that show him in a good light, you will get more of that. But if you dislike him and that’s what you read then you will get more of that. To the point where you can’t even stand to look at him. Think about our last three presidents, Biden, Trump and Obama. If you voted for and loved one of them you probably kept on loving him, because that’s what you’re getting shown, but if you hated him, you definitely kept on hating him because that’s all you saw.
It really is kind of scary how one sided we’ve become and how entrenched in our ideas we can become if we aren’t careful. But just like me with the religion I left. I wasn’t looking for people who had good experiences with it, I wanted to hear the people that had my experience so I didn’t feel so alone, but the problem with that is now you not going to be open to or see the good anymore because that’s not what you’re looking for and slowly you start becoming closed to even the thought of anything being good about that thing…whether it be a president, a vaccine, a religion.
We aren’t becoming more open with technology. We are actually becoming bitter and angry and entrenched in our beliefs that may or may not even be our own beliefs. We may have just read it over and over and thought it over and over so now it’s become our belief. That’s why we have to be so careful when we go searching the internet, it isn’t offering you the chance to learn something new….it’s offering you the chance to reinforce what you already think UNLESS you’re being intentional. If you haven’t watched the movie “The Social Dilemma” It’s a must. It will disturb and enlighten you at the same time.
The internet and unbelievable amounts of information being available at our fingertips isn’t going anywhere. It’s all been so new and fast changing that we have all been kind of oblivious about what it’s doing to us. We our becoming intolerant to ideas that are different from ours. And that’s never good. SO, We’ve had time to examine our new toy, the internet and now we have to figure out how to use it so that it makes us better not worse.
My challenge to you today is to take one idea you have that you are convinced you’re right about and search the internet for ideas that prove you wrong. You’re going to be uncomfortable reading it at first and then after a few articles you might find yourself softening and going OK, I can see the other side, I don’t really buy into that but I now understand how they can get to that point. Trust me on this, it’s an uncomfortable, and really freeing feeling. You don’t have to change your mind about it, just notice how understanding the thought process of the different opinion softens you to it. You can do it with anything.
Share this with 3 open people I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days. qq
