Can we avoid being influenced?
You wake up and make your breakfast, a smoothie bowl, acai bowl, maybe avocado on toast. Then you get dressed in clothing that is usually in style in some way, you go to wash your face, put on makeup with products. You think about breaking free whilst at work; what would you rather be doing? Maybe try your hand at making sourdough at the weekend perhaps, or think about redesigning your living space.
How many of those choices were made entirely alone, determined only by the person making them with no outside influence whatsoever? How many choices do you make alone without any outside influence whatsoever?
I get up every morning and attempt to have a smoothie most mornings, because somebody told me it was healthy. I put on clothes that are mildly fashionable; I want to look my best. I wash my face and apply makeup, using products only based on recommendation from others. And that’s just the first half hour of my day. How many choices a day come purely from my mind, and aren’t alien hosts that have come from outside my being?
Influence is all around us whether we like it or not, it’s even a job for some, and it can be as subtle or as in your face as you like. From the obvious; what we wear, or what we drive to the very hidden ways it sneaks in on us like how we feel about others, our likes and dislikes, even our favourite colour. Choices that we believe were our own are usually planted there by many forms of outside influences, including friends, family, the internet, social media and television, it’s all around us; our free will and freedom to choose completely original ideas that form entirely without influence is probably near impossible
Once you start unpicking yourself from it, it’s hard to tell which parts are uniquely yours and what is coming in every hour of every day — what part of ourselves can we truly own, and what is merely multiple different people telling us how to be?
So how do we avoid it? Sometimes what we see around us isn’t necessarily bad for us; we can feel inspired, try new things, learn new skills, it can lead us to paths that may have taken longer to discover if we were to do things completely alone, or we may have never found it at all. As human beings we are open to new, we embrace learning and are constantly dissatisfied with life — so we become seekers of knowledge, we become open to experience and we blindly chase newness.
However, bending to all those preloaded choices, becoming influenced to a degree where our lives are being dictated by what we see online is not good for us, being dictated to by groups of friends as to who we talk to and who we avoid; this is when our choices are stolen from us, becoming twisted and false; our pack mentality kicks in, we don’t follow our own voices, our conscience, but instead opt to blend in and group together. There’s also lack of individualism, lack of unique and original, intimate us, just us, ourselves, alone to think and just be, instead we are boxing ourselves in choosing to live our lives based on others; hundreds of thousands of copies uploading their lives to hopefully influence others to follow in the same way. Over and over again.
‘The Matrix was a documentary’
Keanu Reeves
