💢 Those Valuable “Individuals”

📍 Today, performative activity on social media and increasing the number of followers and likes have become part of many people's lives. The question is: behind the thousands, perhaps millions, of likes and followers in the virtual world, how many are genuinely the primary audience of what is being posted? We can reflect on this question through the Pareto Principle.

📍 The Pareto Principle is a familiar 80/20 principle in economics, business and production: eighty per cent of an outcome is said to arise from twenty per cent of the group being addressed. If you have ten thousand members in a network of readers, perhaps only two thousand are likely to be your principal audience. Of one thousand Facebook friends, perhaps only two hundred will have a meaningful engagement with your post, and of those two hundred only around forty may engage somewhat more deeply.

If you are genuinely looking for an authentic audience for something you regard as important, make your aim the “individuals,” not the numbers. The quality of the group formed with those who truly stand beside us does not increase linearly with its size; sometimes a single person may be a force more valuable than thousands. Never abandon your highest values, who you truly are or what you genuinely believe for the sake of popularity, because only then will those valuable and genuine individuals find you.

📍 If, with continuity and consistency, you share material of value with others and make an honest effort to invite them to think—or to engage with whatever it is you genuinely want to offer—you will gradually create a brand around your work, and that brand will eventually find its audience. If, however, most of what you share—more than forty per cent—is directed only towards yourself and does not move beyond photographs and writings about “me” and what this “important me” feels, perhaps it is worth reflecting on that more carefully.

📍 The truth is that if we spend eight hours a day trying to present a brighter and better image of ourselves in order to receive likes from others, it will gradually become harder to accept the greyer and less luminous reality of our own lives—especially because we live in a world where we compare our grey reality with the bright, colourful but often unreal images of other people's happiness.

To what extent is other people's opinion of you equivalent to truth or a reflection of reality? To what extent does their opinion determine your value, or the value of a piece of writing, a photograph or anything else? The answers to these questions are inversely related to self-confidence and to the respect we hold for ourselves, for others and for truth. The more affirmative the answer, the more our life is founded upon the search for other people's approval.

📍 Some time ago research at Stanford University concerning students who had died by suicide was discussed. Many of these students, even up to the time of their deaths, had presented an idealised and happy picture of themselves on social media. The researchers called the phenomenon Duck Syndrome because ducks on the surface of water appear to move with extraordinary ease and smoothness, while beneath the water their legs are working continuously to make that movement possible—something invisible to anyone watching the duck glide serenely across the surface.

It is important to understand that neither the image we present nor the image of happiness we see in the photographs, journeys and parties of others is the whole picture of our lives or theirs. What ultimately matters is who we are within ourselves.

📍 In his famous play No Exit!, Jean-Paul Sartre tells the story of three sinners condemned to remain in hell for eternity. Hell contains neither fire nor physical torture; it is simply a small room in which the three are condemned to spend eternity together while each believes himself or herself to be better than the image held by the other two.

The final line, spoken by one of them, is “Hell is other people!”—a phrase associated with Sartre's philosophy of “the Look.” The presence of others causes us to see ourselves as an Object, transforming us from a free human being into a “thing” among other things. In this sense, the presence of others becomes a hell for our freedom because it freezes us into the fixed form of what we are—in what Sartre calls facticity—and prevents our transcendence.

🖊 Aydin Areta
@darichehaa