Escape the Bubble

and break free from the illusion of powerlessness, and separateness

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Attributed to multiple authors.

Almost everyone has perspectives, preferences, and principles that form their thoughts, words, and actions, and nearly everyone believes that they have arrived at those conclusions organically. But what if I told you that the thoughts you think are original might not be?

What if I also told you that most of what you believe is a collection of programs meant to keep you in a state of fear so that you might be better controlled and so that those in control remain relevant and ‘necessary’?

To make things even more complicated, we have an inner narrator bent on convincing us that we must have certainty at every turn. The narrator is on a constant quest to create a sense of safety for you. Yet, that ‘safety’ born of pseudo-certainty is imagined rather than real. Safe, to the narrator, is synonymous with control. The need to control is rooted in fear. Fearful people are extremely easy to control, use, and manipulate.

So, to try to sum this up, there is an external force (or forces) that wants you very, very afraid, and an internal narrator, or ego mind, that urges fearful reactivity to craft a sense of certainty in a world that is in constant flux and fundamentally uncertain. This is slavery!

This enslavement has never been so obvious. Social media has provided a near-perfect mirror to reflect our condition, and more and more people are waking up to the fact that they have been manipulated, used, and controlled in some way or another. And not at all by whom they thought.

Algorithm:

A finite set of unambiguous instructions that, given some set of initial conditions, can be performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a certain goal and that has a recognizable set of end conditions.

I find algorithms so interesting. In the online world and in the media, algorithms have been skillfully weaponized. They have been used to have us believe that we are all living in different realities, whether we are aware of it or not.

No one is seeing what I am seeing on my device, and I’m not seeing what’s on theirs. My device is simply responding to what it has been programmed to provide what I want to hear, believe, and buy, or what the other person wants to hear, believe, and buy.

This false reality is being fed to us 24/7. It makes us feel isolated, helpless, and alone, encourages an ‘us vs. them’ paradigm, and motivates us to buy whatever is being sold. We are literally being toyed with in a bubble we have built for ourselves via our attention and unhealthy addiction to both media and social media. We have built a prison for ourselves, and someone, or rather something, has been more than happy to assist in that effort.

This generated bubble we find ourselves in is not reality. It is not the ‘real’ world. In the real world, your Republican neighbor has no intention of storming your house with his hunting rifle. The Democrat, who happens to be shopping next to you at Walmart, probably doesn’t want you to die if you are a Christian. The Moderate, or non-political person, you see at the Dollar Store, is likely not apathetic towards the suffering of others.

Most normal people, regardless of their ideology, are not going to harm you or want to, although they might disagree with you about certain things. For the most part, much of what they believe about you, and you about them, is manufactured. However, on your feed, you will see the ones that do want to harm others, and that image will serve to polarize you even more against this fabricated ‘other side’. Your internet feed, or whatever periodical you read, is carefully curated to push certain ideas that fuel fear, outrage, despair, judgment, and intolerance. It encourages us to see people as ‘others’, displaying only the worst of the worst, and the most shocking events and behaviors. Having that confirmed repeatedly, we end up only tolerating those living in a bubble that bears some similarities to our own.

Much of this goes unchecked because we don’t engage in what my wise husband calls ‘adult conversations’. We may talk ‘at’ each other, but we don’t talk ‘to’ one another, and rarely do we do it in person anymore. ‘They’, or ‘it’, whatever they or it are, have been winning at this game, and mankind has been losing. It’s not us against the other. That’s a made-up story. It’s us against whatever it is that would have us fear one another.

It’s time to take our power back and burst that damn bubble! But how do we break our addiction to our feeds and the outrage peddled by them? How do we heal the wounds inflicted by them?

To take back agency, one only needs to recognize the truth. We have all been fooled, and there is no shame in this. Then, tune out of clown world and tune into what is real. Literally put down all media as much as it is humanly possible. To prevent further infection, we must keep any wounds we might have suffered from past exposure clean. No more exposing them to filthy conditions. They need cleansing and fresh air, and require us to consume what nourishes us rather than what weakens us. This process will require strength and courage. Strength, needed to break its hold on us, and courage to have difficult conversations with actual, real people, one on one, rather than online arguments and broad assumptions about the other. Stay out of the comments sections, as it’s very likely that many commenters might not be actual people.

Empowered and unified, we are unstoppable. ‘They’ or ‘it’ know that. Let us stop giving away our power and being manipulated, used, and encouraged to hate one another. Let us instead build a beautiful future together, rooted in love, respect, and understanding.

Blessings!

April