Jun 15, 2021
10,000 Steps Closer to Hell
A woman I know posted that she’d done 10,000 steps that day. She’d also worked out, posted a video of her doing planks, elaborated on how many calories she’d burned, shared pictures of her food and outlined her exercise plans for the next day. “I want to hit 11,000 tomorrow” she exclaimed.
In other posts she speaks of struggles with anxiety, frustration, and feelings of inadequacy.
I’m not surprised. How did we get so disconnected from ourselves?
It must have been hell for the folks in Texas this past winter when their power grid went down. How did they know what kind of a day they were having? Did they fall into complete meltdowns after being forcibly detached from their devices? Did they not know how to function without posting, sharing, liking, and calculating? How did everyone know what they had to eat for lunch? Or maybe, that crisis helped them realize there is a world that exists beyond their keyboard and phones and finally allowed them to see what’s really important… family, friends, health and safety.
I will acknowledge that many great things have come from this amazing technological age of connection we now live in, but is it really the kind of connection we need? Or does it simply feed our ego and edge out the really important things in our lives?
If were aren’t hooked in enough, there’s now an app that tells you how much time you’re spending on other apps. Really? Does anyone need one more device or app to make us feel worse about ourselves or heighten already soaring feelings of inadequacy?
We are hooked in, tuned in, and connected to…. the wrong things. We shouldn’t be connected to things at all. We should be connected to experiences, to knowledge, to animals and nature, to each other.
Many people reach for their phones the first moment they wake up, long before they have taken a deep breath and counted all the things they have to be appreciative of. Imagine a world where we counted our blessings and not our steps.
