My morning routine starts with social media
Every morning, before I do any kind of work, I read the news and take a look at my social media channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
How to do social media like a boss
It’s inevitable. Every morning, I see someone (especially on LinkedIn) teaching us how to be a pro on LinkedIn, how to get more followers, how to get more engagement, how to stand out above the competition, how to do social media like a boss.
And thus, a lot of social media stars have been born.
Being famous just to be famous
What’s even more surprising, is that many of those new social media stars, don’t have a business model behind it, they don’t have a product sell, a service to offer. They just want the attention because that’s what they are told they should aspire to have.
And so, they post every day, they make connections, they create videos with captions, good sound and light, they post professional photos, the write clickbait text, and they do whatever it takes to reach the desired vanity metrics.
If you are not the client you are the product
Until one day, they realize that they are pawns in a chess game. That if they are not the client, they are the product; that their eyeballs are being sold to the highest bidder. That they have struggled to get all that attention to make shareholders even richer.
This is how I lie to myself and to you
Me too, I have given my time and my eyeballs to social media, but even worse, I still engage in the activity of producing free content for the richest people in the world.
I lie to myself. I tell myself that I do it for my business, for my podcast, for my photography business, for my new website development business…
But if I am honest to myself and to you the reader, I too, I have fallen victim to the social media virus. The virus that takes hundreds of my productive hours away and that makes me feel inadequate when comparing myself to others.
My name is Alain and I am an addict
My name is Alain Guillot, and I am addicted to likes, comments, views, shares, and retweets.
I lie to you in a way that I misrepresent my life. I try to make myself smarter, successful, interesting, and happy.
But the truth is that those are micro-moments of my life are not different than a broken clock being right twice a day. Those micro-moments represent two minutes in a day of 1,440 minutes.
The truth is that most of my days are boring. I don’t make my bed, I waste too much time staring out of my window, I daydream a lot, I never wear anything fashionable. More than frugal, I am cheap. After 22 years in Canada, I still struggle with my English. And I don’t have a girlfriend.
I see my social posts, and I wish I was the guy I am pretending to be. What’s worse, some of my followers wish they could be like me.
As I go through my day, reading, writing, or cooking, I come up with ideas of something smart to post the next day. I keep a small notebook where I keep those ideas, and the next day I cross out a few of the ones I don’t like anymore, and I post the winner.
Why am I sharing all this?
I feel at times that we have become victims of the robber barons of Silicon Valley. That we act like rats in a maze while they watch from above. Then they adjust the algorithm in order to keep us engaged just a bit longer.
None of us are living the life we pretend to live. But that’s ok because we are human beings.
There are so many of us who fall victim to the comparison syndrome. We feel that we are less only because others appear to be more. But no one is showing a true picture of themselves. We don’t know what’s going on behind that perfect Instagram photo. We don’t see all the fears and insecurities behind that beautiful and confident smile.
Let’s be conscious that no one is telling the truth, and maybe one day we will decide that we don’t have to work so hard to make the social media shareholders even richer.
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Connect with me
I would love it if you connect with me via social. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.