I was inspired to watch "The Social Dilemma" a couple weeks ago. Couldn't explain why, just felt like there would be something in it that I would really like. We don't have Netflix, so I subscribed and my husband and I sat down and watched it. Then we watched it again.
For those who have seen it, I know it could be easy to walk away from it wanting to delete apps, shut off notifications on your devices, and resist the world of tech. But the more I thought about it the more I was able to see, that in there own way, they were really talking about LOP.
They spoke about how our attention is a commodity and that every click we make on our devices, on any of the apps, is remembered and added to a profile of us as something that interests us. How long we stay on any particular article, photo, video is also remembered and logged as something that is important to us. They explained how important our attention is and that thousands of advertisers are wanting our attention and paying big money for our attention. And perhaps most interestingly we are given more articles, advertisements, videos, etc. of exactly what we have told the app is of interest to us. The more we get, the more we click and focus. The more we focus the more it seems to be fact/the truth/real.
What dawned on me is this is what is happening anyways. Facebook and the other tech companies just wrote an algorithm as to what we naturally do in our lives. Lou Tice coined the phrase decades ago "we move towards and act like that which we think about." Einstein is quoted as saying "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer," which is a statement about attention and focus. And in LOP I often refer to the upward and downward spiral of life, and how when we get on either of them there seems to be a momentum that takes us farther and farther in the direction of our attention.
So, whether we are on Facebook or not, we still have an algorithm watching everything we choose, focus on, pay attention to. Our minds are built to filter and sift through the extraordinary amounts of data we have bombarding us everyday and pick out the data we have deemed important through our attention.
I guess then the question becomes not what it true/right/proven (because our algorithms will support us in whatever we have given our attention to), but what am I clicking on? Where am I spending the commodity of my attention? Am I focused on what I want or what I don't want? Am I focused on being right or being happy? Am I focused on info that will prove my point so that I don't need to update what I believe, or am I focused on understanding a variety of viewpoints? Am I focused on winning at all costs, or on all of us winning. Am I focused on what to fear, or what I can appreciate? Am I putting my attention towards resisting what is going on, or knowing that solutions are formulating? Am I instructing the Facebook algorithm, or my own personal algorithm, to collect more information about what takes me on the downward spiral or the upward spiral?
I realize that it may seem easy, as 'The Social Dilemma' points out, to become addicted to what we have already been clicking on -- this is the natural momentum of focus. We may find ourselves constantly checking our phones and apps seeing how many likes we have, responding to notifications that interrupt our focus, and seeing what the latest information is about someone we don't even know. We begin to feel like Pavlov's dog and that doesn't feel good, and the reason it doesn't feel good is because it is usually giving us more of what isn't important to us/not in alignment with who we really are. We have ended up feeling out of control in our lives, but we are the ones clicking on the things that are not in alignment with our priorities.
The good news, what I took away from the documentary, is we don't have to cut tech out of our lives, we are not victims of it, and we do not need to resist what we notice in our lives. The good news is we can just be pickier about where we focus, what we click on, and where we are 'spending' this commodity that is our attention. The good news is we are in the drivers seat, we are in control. The good news is we are not destined to a life of being a commodity or of mediocrity. We can change the pop-ups on our apps and we can change our perception about what pops up in our lives. We can go from the downward spiral to the upward spiral by choosing what we click on. The algorithms in our lives are bringing to us and showing us what we are choosing, and what a great way to get better and better at clarifying what is a priority to us and clicking on that instead.
LOP is about paying attention to what I am paying attention to so that those who are paying for my attention are serving me, what I really want, and who I really am.