5 Things of Everyday

One tiny revelation: the fuller my life is at the moment – the emptier my social media profile is 🙂 And sometimes, even this blog (which is sad).

Whenever I see my facebook feed, there is so much life going on: people eating out with their boyfriends, visiting christmas markets, traveling, having drinks. And the more I eat out with my husband, or have drinks, or visit any kind of cozy market – the less I feel like sharing it. And when it gets even more intense – I feel like going under water. There is so much going on IRL, in real life, that there are no more emotions left to do the social media sharing.

These past weeks have been pretty intense – with good things. After writing several posts on inspiration here and here, I have discovered my own simple truth: the importance of being bored. I don’t know about you, but I need to be bored (in a good sense) in order to create. I need a silence and space to feel the need to create. When there is so much input, I just don’t feel like working on output. My energy goes on digesting the impressions. And no energy is left for making expressions.

In the middle of all this positive turmoil I have found my anchor: my everyday routine. Today I am coming back to the beauty of my everyday things. This post of five things I like, is devoted to them 🙂

my everyday company

The Burden of Being Young

Some weeks ago we were walking through the woods – and I suddenly got the flashback of my adolescence. We were visiting friends outside of Oslo and took a walk to the beach. Through the woods which went up and down, with a little river and a bridge over it. This spot brought a vivid memory of a similar place in other woods – in the village where my grandmother lived. I walked there, some 14 years old, and that place seemed just charming to me. Why? Because I thought, it would look perfect in the photo. At that time my pictures could be taken by the old black-and-white analog camera, difficult in use. Why did I want those photos? Passion for photography at such a young age?

No, it was not the passion for art. It was a wish to show something to my classmates. And how did I get inspired? So, there was this popular girl in our class, Irina, and in the back of her day-book (an obligatory book where we noted our schedule, homework and the teacher put our marks into it) she had some chocolate wrapping papers and photos. Yes, we were showing each other the papers of sweets we ate. Asking each other: “Did you try Mars? Did you try Snickers?”

Life Without Instagram

Once I fell in love with the notion of Experimental Life (introduced by Jonathan Fields on my favorite podcast The Good Life Project). It proposes to see our projects not in the terms of succeeding/failing but in terms of an experiment: whatever outcome is, you have collected some data. This gives a kinder perspective on what we use to call “mistakes”. And it also encourages me to test different lifestyle habits without letting it define me. Last year I had an experiment of doing a social media detox and I wrote about it here – later also I went off Instagram for three months. Now I want to share why I did it and what I have learnt from it.

Instagrammers’ hot spot in Naples

What do the social media do to us – and what do we do with it?

If I were 18 now I would have ADHD or concentration problems. I would switch between studying and checking my Snapchat every 15 minutes. I would have distorted image of real life. I would believe that the people on Facebook and Instagram have a lot of fun in their real life, and I don’t. I would have distorted image of myself. Well, it was already distorted, so maybe, it would not be that worse)). But my self-esteem would suffer since I would compare myself not to the glossy images on TV, but to “real” images of beauty bloggers of Youtube and those Instagram divas with styled brows, big lips and sexy limbs which they are not shy to show.

Yes, I am talking about the social media and how it changes our ways. I don’t want to make an apocalyptic analysis here, and I don’t want to draw a totally negative picture –  I am just really curious about how did happen that we got addicted to sharing, and what does it do to us? I imagined how that would have shaped me when I was growing, and to be honest, I am happy that I grew up in the pre-Internet era. But today’s youth seem to cope with it somehow, and I wonder how they do it. I also wonder how people manage to keep balance in the time when it is so easy to get absorbed into all those distractions. The smartphone is called “A cigarette of modern age” – I find this metaphor aptly as I see the mobile glued to the hand of everyone like a cig was in the movies of 60s. So how do the people cope with this new addiction?

Google picture