Stop consuming, start creating

These times are exciting times to live in. The world is connected, frontiers are shorter thanks to the internet, and we have almost everything basically in our pockets. Lot of us have seen the rise of so many products and services that are fundamental and basically part of our daily usage. Great services like Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, YouTube, Uber, Amazon are one of the few, but the list is endless.

Apps to work out, monitor sleep, diet tracking, grammar, and spelling. There’s basically a service or an app to do something for us. There’s no harm in this since a lot of these services are meant to make our lives easier and remove mental cycles to dedicate them to things we enjoy or spend more time with the ones we love. The big problem with this though is somewhere down this path of making human activities simpler or easier, some essential part that makes us humans are being held or even removed.

People can spend hours going through Facebook timelines, Tweeter feeds, Instagram posts, Youtube playlists and so on. In many cases, we are just more concerned about the world that’s happening inside our cell phones than the world that lies before our eyes. The mental cycles used to talk in front of each other are almost gone. We worry too much about capturing pictures or video to keep on our cell phones instead of creating memories that will last a lifetime, not until your cloud service provider fails or decides that is time to pay for more space.

Some are committed to reducing these habits and trick their mind watching videos or dig the internet search for material related to a skill they want to improve. This approach is a good start but after some time it will get you to a similar state of mind, and I have some (non-breaking) news:

The matrix has you!.

To change things in your favor, I’m not going to say “disconnect and go hide in a cave”, because that won’t be realistic. As mentioned before, lots of these services are great, in fact, I use them regularly. What I would say though is try to find a balance between the time spent holding your cellphone (or sit in front of your laptop) and instead do something, create something!. New habits, new friends, new connections, moments worth to remember or anything you can think of is a great fit.

If you are trying to gain new skills, then practice!. Forget about knowing it all before getting started. Get informed, get your hands dirty, make mistakes, learn from them, resolve doubts, move on!.

One of the things that separate us from the other species in this world, is the fact that we are able to reason, to imagine, to create!. All these characteristics that make us unique on this planet, and even among each other are the ones that need to be exploded and continuously fed. Don’t let the current technology advancements play against the humanity, and

don’t let machines take control!.