Last time I heard, the Earth was still spinning at the same rate, and time was taking the normal amounts of itself to pass us by. I think if you really stopped to look, though, you'd see we're moving faster and faster as a human race now than ever before. And we're missing a hell of a lot in the process.
We collect and collect all the time: clothes, friends, movies, books, experiences, and destinations. But then, very quickly, we need more. We need more shoes, more books, more pictures and experiences from more trips. And they're all just stacking up everywhere we look.
Our disposable culture isn't just in stuff we can hold in our hands, or things to do, but in our online self-sharing too. We post to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and more all the time. We literally "throw ourselves out" there for others to collect. We want to be loved, to be accepted, to be laughed at because of what we said, to be celebrated for our most recent quip or story.
All of life has become disposable. We retain memories and post throwback pictures of times gone by, but the seconds, minutes, months, and years are flying past us, and all we're doing is throwing more and more out into the wind.
And yet none of that is an innately evil fact. Putting ourselves "out there" is not an immoral truth about ourselves, nor is the speed with which we're doing it. But it's worth pausing, for at least the few moments it's taking you to read this, to examine what exactly we're accomplishing with all of this disposing. How are we growing ourselves or our lives because of it? How are we helping our minds and souls to learn from life?
The truth is, we're all just like kids standing in front of a fan. We toss a feather, a plastic bag, or a tissue in front of the fan to see what happens. It's a game of cause and effect on a larger scale, that gets more and more complicated the more people we're reaching through our words and actions.
A throwaway comment about a celebrity becomes a lot more powerful when it's done on a public forum where the celebrity--a human being--happens to frequent. A simple comment on a friend's post gets chopped up and reread in a way we never even intended. We throw out words and actions constantly, sometimes for fun, and sometimes to see what will happen. Sometimes the plastic bag flies up in the wind, and sometimes it gets caught in the fan blades and is destroyed.
Our disposable culture is everywhere, and the only way to stop becoming such emotional litterbugs is to really focus on what we choose to put out there. Your garbage is your business, and it shouldn't be thrown all around the emotional and digital highways of the world. Likewise, your talents, your love, and your best self is always welcome to spread itself around. Offer goodness and kindness to the world, and goodness and kindness will, more often than not, come wafting your way in return.
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