Losing perspective on our problems

November 13, 2024

It is not good for people to be socially isolated.

A few months ago I watched a video by ecofriend. lia, minimalism might not be the answer. In this video she discusses a number of subjects all loosely related to one another but one idea in particular stuck out:

I read a book of someone who did an expedition to Antarctica. She was on her own for extended period of time. What she said is that whenever she’s alone, it’s not a huge problem but she realizes that because you’re just in your head you start to lose sight of the size of your problems. What she described is that after 40 days of being completely alone, because she did not have any contact to other people, sometimes small problems became really important and it was really hard to gain a perspective and a relationship between what is important and what is not very important.

When you are alone for too long, you start to lose perspective on the size of your problems.

By proxy, thinking about minimalism can also be a symptom of this problem. If you are so worried about the stuff you own, then maybe it is not the stuff, but some other underlying unaddressed anxiety.

Spending time on the internet in parasocial interactions doesn’t solve the underlying problem either. People on the internet exaggerate what is important in life. The saga of the Belltown Hellcat as chronicled on r/Seattle is another such example of the meaningless, but rather irrelevant content available to read about.

You could also say the same about politics. In the most recent election, many people are emotionally affected by the outcome. Again when we spend our day reading and watching stuff on the internet where people exaggerate what is important and what is not, we lose perspective. Much of what we read did not in fact prepare us because the news and social media does not allow us to really understand others.

Thus when someone mentioned they plan to take a break from social media (specifically Reddit), I chuckled a bit. Without a doubt social media and Reddit are harmful, especially for political news. It’s wise to step back from these platforms because they aren’t making us informed. It’s not easy to step away, but now more than ever we need to strengthen the relationships with each other instead of allowing tech billionaire run social media apps to command anymore of our time and attention.