While we all have something to teach in this world, lately, it has gone too far.
Fame seekers who have fallen in love with the sounds of their own voices and sights of their own words giving out bad advice have become so strikingly obvious that nausea rises from my newsfeed daily.
Frantically trying to be a guru teaching well before any mastery has taken place is now the desperate cry of attention-seeking narcissists thinly veiled in well-written posts. If you tap into your body when reading or hearing this type of dribble, you’ll feel it. Your stomach tightens when you’re being duped and irritation rises when you’re being manipulated by overly used descriptive words to wield surprise.
Why? Because fame seekers feed on attention.
These pseudo-prophets are energy suckers, plain and simple. Like poorly behaved presidential candidates slinging mud and getting down and dirty to appease the lowest intellect and emotional intelligence of our society, these false gurus are feeding on the most precious resource we have – our attention.
Time is short and our willingness to think for ourselves is waning, this combo makes for a risky walk down pop culture amateur hour lane. No longer do we take the time to actually explore and read up on a subject, oh no – now we simply scan the newest yoga teacher’s or guru wannabe’s musings online.
Surely they know what they’re talking about if there’s a shiny photo and catchy title, there’s probably great wisdom there right?
Would you look at that? This post has more than 50 likes, they must be on to something.
According to Alyssa Siegal of Psychology Tomorrow, “We are not a particularly think-for-yourself culture. From an early age, most of us are taught what we should do – to simply accept convention and follow it. And although that may rub up against us in uncomfortable ways at times, we usually act with complicity, allowing others to make decisions for us”.
In a culture known for selling fast, nutritionally empty food, our society is filled with plenty of empty headed preaching evangelist’s looking for hungry followers, and there’s more than enough of us willing to pull up a cafeteria tray and listen.
When did we start giving our power away to other people and following their advice so blindly?
Twenty something’s are spouting life advice, overweight people are giving diet tips, and unhappy people in sour marriages are teaching relationship seminars, yet we spoon it up like starving children looking for an empty snack to bide our time before dinner. There’s nothing wrong with being hungry for new information, that’s healthy, but looking for it in all the wrong places is not.
The minute you see those overly descriptive blog posts dribbling pronouns like sexy little foreplay innuendos designed to snag your attention, raise those B.S. feelers God so graciously gave you at birth, aka your intuition, and scroll on. If you take a moment, you can feel when you’re being duped and know when you’re being led down a road leading towards oh I’m an expert, read on and I’ll sell you a program-ville.
Bottom line? We’ve gotten lazy in our quest for information. Like choosing a book based on its cover or a bottle of wine because of the pretty label (you’re not alone there), we’ve begun taking advice from amateur idiots looking for fame because they appear shiny.
If you want to save yourself and your intelligence, then quit buying into pop-culture advice and lists of anything. We already know deep inside what we do to sabotage ourselves, we know what to eat and what not to eat, and we know what we’re doing to blast our relationships down the toilet. If we don’t then we should go see an expert versus appeasing the hungry egos of the pop experts.
The word pop was originally derived from the word popular. Remember the thinly veiled mask of fakeness worn by someone who tried to be popular? It’s an illusion.
We’re no longer encouraged to think for ourselves. Instead, we give our power away to so called online experts. Rather than digging deep inside ourselves and following our own knowing or doing our own research, we blindly follow the latest blogger with the largest following.
My father bestowed brilliant advice upon me as I entered the workforce for the very first time. He said to me: Learn to think for yourself kiddo, opinions are like a**holes, everyone has one.
But then again, don’t believe me, I sell programs.
😉
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photo credit: Ring Tailed Lemur ( Lemur Lemur ) via photopin (license)