Too Many Gurus, Not Enough Students

“I adhere to a guru-free philosophy, I don’t claim to have all the answers.” - Chris Guillebeau

Social media is inundated with gurus. Beneath the facade of most wisdom-givers is a product to sell, or a subscription, or a “like” button. If you do not pay the gurus with money, which you usually do, you pay them with your time. Interspersed with the time you spend reading or listening to them are advertisements that remind you of the core of the guru’s wisdom. Your current life is lacking, and this product is the key to improvement.

“Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin claimed. I do not wholly agree because I see time as a more valuable commodity than money. Franklin measured time as a cost in dollars per hour when in fact one cannot put such a number on something so intangible. Money can only satisfy the flesh, whereas time can satisfy the soul. We have too precious little time to spend and our sense of time accelerates as we age. Giving our time to fake gurus, or to anyone in a wasteful manner, is a higher cost, in my opinion, than adding credit card debt to our bank accounts. Time has been sold to them, and if the guru succeeds, credit card debt will accumulate anyways. Adding credit card debt, by the way, can be very damaging to the human spirit.

It seems like these days it is the gurus themselves that are often the commodities. Companies buy them in exchange for the act of flaunting their products on YouTube or Instagram or whereever the hell they taut their grandeur. Gurus are often nothing more than vessels for selling things to people. They are interchangeable in the eyes of a corporation. They are bodies for t-shirts, mouths for online programs. They are essentially McDonald’s stores, and we, the readers and viewers, are often sitting in the drive-through lines, “engaged” with social media, for something that earns someone else profit.

It is a fine line when blogging between giving advice and sharing things I’ve learned. Sometimes I have to catch myself and backtrack. The last thing I want to be is a guru, and the last thing I want as a measurement of a writer’s success is an engagement metric. To me it’s more about finding things that go well or wrong in your life and thinking, “If this is resonating with me, maybe it will with someone else too,” and then putting those thoughts to words.

Life is about connection, not subscription.

Shop ‘Til You Drop

“By parading a stream of other people’s lives in front of us, screens remove the responsibility to create our own lives. This makes us radically powerless, and powerlessness leads to anxiety. And Anxiety leads to shopping. Shopping leads to debt. Debt leads to more anxiety. The cycle ends with death.” - Tom Hodgkinson

I attempted a return to Instagram recently. I know intrinsically that Instagram is mostly toxic, but I intellectualized a justification to return. I want to connect, I told myself. I want to show people what I’m doing! If I ride down the world’s tallest waterfall but no one is there to see it, did it really happen? Besides, I thought, Instagram can be a potential aid to my blog readership!

And as the bright, dopamine-inducing flashing colors that embroider new Instagram stories and notifications rushed over me, I felt some sense of elation. It felt like belonging. I was genuinely sharing with a community.

The first few days upon creating an IG account, I was able to log out of Instagram pretty easily. This doesn’t seem so toxic, I thought. Besides, people want to see what I’m up to!

But as days went by I found my thoughts increasingly turning to Instagram. The updates to my newsfeed were constant, and this platform seemed to lead down a rabbit hole of possibilities. I can peak into the lives of famous people, catch glimpses of new company products, and show the world my latest jacket. Isn’t that great? I have a lens into anyone and everyone I want to see.

But are we meant to see anyone and everyone? Does it remove us too much from where we are today?

Before I knew it, Instagram was invading far too much of my time. And my thoughts were no longer on writing, or cycling, or traveling. They were on Instagram.

So what if Instagram aids in blog viewership? I write this blog for myself. And so what if no one can witness me ride down the world’s tallest waterfall, or swim with great white sharks (I have done neither of these by the way). If I saw and felt the experiences, and I still have two hands and a page to type or write on, I can try to put my recollections to words. If my camera captured anything, all the better.

It’s more meaningful when you write on your own platform.

I feel better having deleted Instagram again. I don’t envy young people who are given such apps and “tools” at a young age. If someone gives a 12 year old cocaine but slaps a warning on the bag that states, “Don’t take too much because it’s actually kinda harmful,” I’m not sure if the 12 year old is going to remain sober for most of his or her waking hours.

These days my main goal is to escape compulsive consumption. Yet there are few tools more effective than Instagram at making us want more. Better clothes, bigger homes, fancier furniture, better vacations. We’re introduced to millions of people seemingly living better lives than us, and we spend increasingly amounts of time living vicariously through their fake world.

But the real world is here and now, in the silence of the present, in the clothes we have on today, on the couch that currently rests in our living room. And if we are ok with this silence, if we are healthy, if we are not suffering… how do we tell ourselves that it’s enough?

Edit: I’m back on Instagram.