Say What?

 Well as I sit here, listening to Prince express himself being openly him. Never believing in gender norms, pushing every boundary, taking no ones opinion on as his own, being completely gender fluid and also loving Jehovah, even going out on door to door missions, not drinking alcohol or using drugs, and giving to many in need organizations, my brain is bombarded with thoughts of life today in 2023. We are tuned into social media 24/7. our phones have become our partners. As a society we find it normal to take pictures of our daily doings and post them onto a public form and allow the entire world to comment about our lives. We put our children online, and allow strangers to peek into their lives and comment on the way they are being raised. We allow our every move to be tracked. We also as a society have become used to censoring ourselves and the way we feel based off social media accounts and people we don't even know. This is such a perplexing situation to me. Having a social media account of any kind is presented as a place for you to be you. They are supposed to be about you and your feelings and life. Yet they come with community guidelines, which are basically rules for you to exist in their world. Whatever the social media outlet, you are bound by their rules and regulations, so therefore you cannot truly be living as your authentic self all the time on these sites. You are being who the sites allow you to be all while making people who don't understand think that you are being authentically you. It's wild. I saw a post about some things happening overseas, and they literally showed a human body in parts, blown apart. I was so shocked and hurt, I couldn't scroll past it fast enough. Yet I commented on a post saying, "Americans should come together and help each other get out of poverty..." and was banned from commenting on the site for 7 days. That shows me that the control is definitely in the hands of that site and there is a huge issue in having us see so much negative things but us trying to come together is a issue because we will definitely realize the crap these sites are feeding us. I never thought I would be the type of person that believes in "the man' or "the system" yet here I sit, in Las Vegas, listening to Prince, sipping tea and typing this, while thinking we need to figure out how to unplug and tune into each other as a society fast our we are doomed to live within the standards of social media in our real lives.