Blog 13 - Appearances

"Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly" - Richard Bach

It's been a long time since I have written anything.. taking into account the long weekend and the summer vacation I kept myself busy travelling.. but anyways in my travel, I realized that it would be great if I start observing patterns in the way people behaved. I saw many people including me in a constant loop of sticking and doodling something on our favourite companion, the cell phone. When a famous social media app (let's call it Z) was designed the researchers wanted to link it to the humans when I said link I meant to make it an addiction. They conducted numerous experiments that would determine a harmless factor that would be addictive to humans that would drag us coming back to the app Z. Its the same kind of feeling when we get when we pass an exam or shop something for ourself or even gossip. The harmless factor is the hormone dopamine*, or commonly known as the happy hormone.

Dopamine is the hormone that gives us the feeling of achievement in most cases fake. It's like posting something on the app Z and waiting for people to praise you for that, I've seen people posting weird stuff and their audience like it, praise it and share it too. What I've realized is that one can know about a person based on the types of applications that they have on their phone. Not all the apps are feeding us dopamine, there are other useful apps that help you in a number of ways other than posing ourselves in front of the virtual audience who we may never see in person. In this era of social media and the data generated by them, the huge data and we are manipulated by the companies handling that data. But apart from all this, I think it's the appearances that matter the most.

There are many schools of thoughts that describe how appearances are and how it is influencing our social life. One theory is what got my attention, as makes perfect sense for the different time periods that we had or probably have. Epictetus and his philosophy on appearances is that appearances to the mind are of 4 types, things either are what they appear to be, or they neither are nor they appear to be, or they are and do not appear to be and finally the 4th type things that are not there yet they appear to be. 

This 4th type is the kind of appearance is what I think we are living in. Let's see how.

I would like to suggest an experiment for you all, however, once you get the validity of the experiment it's entirely your choice to keep doing it, I would warn you that it's very addictive. 

Before you start with this experiment you gotta analyze the State of mind you are in, say normal, happy, ambitious or sad. Once you determine this take something from your phone's gallery be it any picture or any quote that you like and post it on a social media platform, I'll say the app Z, you can guess which app I am talking about. Make sure you post it as a story where you can see who has seen your post. You'll get a window for 24 hours. Once this time frame is over once again analyze your mental state and I'm sure you will feel towards the positive side of feeling good, Happy, ambitious or sad. That's the dopamine which will make you feel better. You can let me know the validity**

We believe in what we perceive to be there irrespective of taking the efforts of digging into the truth. The truth is going nowhere but we got to hear it if it is true not just assume in the back of our minds that something is there. The 4th type can be applied to everything, humans, animals, movies social media posts actually everything. In animals, imagine a tiger stalking a gazelle and the gazelle watching the tiger, this is one situation which is there at the present where the tiger sees the gazelle and gazelle sees the tiger. On the other hand, the gazelle stays in constant fear of insecurity where it imagines the tiger being stalking it taking in to account the camouflage that the tiger has in terms of the stripped skin, hence the 4th kind, things that are not but yet they appear to be. The fear is the driving force behind the belief that the gazelle has. We can apply the same analogy to humans where our insecurities do not let is see the things the way they are and the things that just appear to be.

Be curious, dig deep, feed your knowledge don't be a normal goose in the breadline.