Personal Growth
Our Identity Is Based On What We Consume Daily
Ever wondered about what made you who you are today?
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We are living in a world where consumption is overwhelming. Being selective with consumption— whether it is food, information, and experience—has become a critical skill set to live a fulfilling life.
Imagine if we only stayed in our bed for a year, watching the same tv show and doing nothing else. Expected, we will only be influenced by the tv-shows and become very limited with our knowledge about the world. Our worldview will only come from only one medium (tv for this situation), which will make us ignorant about what is really happening in our real world.
As technology evolved, TVs are now in our smartphones and computers. We get to choose which information we want to consume; however, we don’t realize that only a few individuals control most online platforms. The rest of the users follow the masses in terms of the information that we consume.
Although the barrier to creating content online is low, allowing millions of different topics and ideas to spread online, we are still consuming the same content because of the algorithms. Abundant content also means that we cannot consume all of the information online. But what we can do instead is to choose which information we’d like to consume.
And because of omnipresent algorithms, being able to choose is becoming more blur. If we watch a video about one topic, our feed will continuously fill with that topic, limiting our choices to those specific topics rather than a broad range of topics. And this goes for many other platforms as well.
So, it’s becoming hard to make conscious choices nowadays. But, no one can teach us how we can make those right choices. Instead, we get slipped out of our focus oftentimes which gets harder to regain our purpose.
And consumption is not only limited to information. Information has become a significant factor that influences our life. There are many other aspects of our lives in terms of consumption that we need to control to live our lives to their fullest.
