Lets Disconnect, Together....

About 6 months ago, I got hooked listening to Ted Talks during my morning and afternoon commutes to and from work.  I could listen to all sorts of Ted conversations and it all started with Simon Sinek (thank you Dr. Padgett).  I started out listening to speakers discuss leadership roles and hot=w to find your why or purpose and I ended up in this cycle of stories going on about how connected we are to one another now that we have so much instant access to everyone and everything, but the question that was continually raised was “is this actually causing us more loneliness”?


The answer was always different because it can go both ways.


At some point we all have to ask ourselves if we are connecting with others for the sake of connection (the number of facebook friends or instagram followers) or are we truly making connections with others. 


Teenagers today seem to be lacking a lot of true connecting skills.  It’s more about how many likes or shares or retweets than it is about having an actual conversation with another person and making a real connection.  This world of instant gratification and well, instant everything makes it so much more difficult to maintain and continue any type of relationship, be it a friendship or otherwise.  Why?  Because you can hop online and find someone else to “listen” or pay attention or bond with you and you can bypass that argument with the person who was already your friend.  We just move around from one person or group to another and never really make roots anywhere.  This generation might even argue with you that roots aren’t so necessary anymore, but they are losing something when they no longer have anyone around to share stories with.  


When there isn’t a person to remind you of something that happened when you were younger or laugh about a funny thing from the past.  “Remember that time when……” can’t happen if you are just moving through different names on a screen and never making real and true connections with others.   These things are so important but if you don’t have them, then you really do not know what you are missing.  Sometimes the hardest part of a new friendship for me is when it first begins because we don’t have any of that history together.  I’ll always invite a friend that I’ve known for a while to spend time with a newer friend of mine as well just to have that story swap and to have that additional opportunity to bond and form a connection (for more than just myself).  It can be uncomfortable at times too, but hey, who ever grew from staying in their comfort zone?


But, lets step away from that aspect of it for just a moment.  As adults, do we not do the same thing?  We’ve learned and studied that people are trusting financial bloggers more than they are their own personal brokers when it comes to the stock market.  Why would we do this?  Why do we feel like we can trust and connect with a stranger from a blog better than a person that we can see and meet with in a live face to face conversation? And what does that say about us or about the trust we are lacking in?


What do you all think about taking a week or so and trying to disconnect a little, so that we can make time for each other? So we can try to learn to trust one another again?

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