You’ve Been Manipulated To Care About What You Shouldn’t
Tags: Anxiety, Self, Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Stress

We got into this world not knowing what to care about. Do you think babies care about money or about status? Or about appearing beautiful or manly? Or about differences between races? No, we were brought into this world not knowing what we should care about.

We are influenced by social media and the general media more so than we would think.

Different cultures care about different things. Have you ever heard of a culture where people marry someone they don’t love just to keep their families happy? Because in such a culture, they’ve been led to believe that family is something they should care the most about. How about honour killing? The act of killing someone so as not to bring shame to the family? Yes, that’s also the result of culture impacting what we believe is important. In such a case, family.

What does our culture think it’s important?

Have you seen how many people have eating disorders? The rate of eating disorders has been suggested to go up because of what society perceived as beautiful — thin, tall women.

This applies to all areas of your lives too. You may be taught that grades are important, money is important, appearing popular is important, etc when really these are social constructs that don’t lend themselves to the unbiased reality of the world.

Think about your lives in more detail. What do you think you care about that you wouldn’t necessarily care for if it wasn’t for the place you were born, the place you were raised, and what you saw on your Instagram feed?

We can’t denounce the influence of our culture and what impacts it has on us and sometimes it’s for the best. Overanalyzing can be an issue in itself. However, a brief analysis of their impacts on our lives may give us a glimpse into what we should adjust in our daily lives.

I’m going to give you an example from my life, when I was in my first year of undergrad, I wanted to become a doctor. What became important and what I’ve been led to care about are the grades, where I do my research, how many research assistant jobs I got, how high my GPA was, whether the professor liked me, whether I got the email address of a recruiter from the hospital, etc. I remember caring so much about these things that I let them overtook my life. I was worried about it day in and day out and I tried my best to be well-rounded and to be the perfect candidate for medical school.

3 years later, none of those things matters to me anymore.

I’m now aiming to be self-employed. I’m a business owner, blogger, and artist. Things took a huge turn for me for the better.

I’m more honest now, about what I want out of life and the things I used to care so much about became irrelevant to my life.

Whatever stage you are in your life, there are things you care about that aren’t necessarily in itself possess much more value compared to anything else in life. What we focus on in this society dictates what we would be manipulated to care about.

Some of the things we care about are harmless and some are harmful. We must differentiate our original point of view from that of societal pressure.

We should all strive to live unencumbered by societal standards.

Imagine if there’s no one to judge and no one to see your accomplishments and status. What would you be doing? What would you really care about?

Be honest, what do you actually care about? What do you want out of life?

It’s only when you started to analyze the influence of the media on what you care about while being honest with yourself, can you start to live authentically.

I hope you all live for yourselves and not for others.