Just kidding. Facebook has not been hiding my posts (more than usual).
I have actually not posted anything in 2023.
That isn’t to say nothing has happened in our Ausome little family…quite the opposite.
So why have I not posted? Writers block? Uninspired?
Not really, as the length of this post will demonstrate.
(Sorry this is a long post. About a 3-minute read)
I haven’t been on social media much lately.
And it isn’t for any particular reason…
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. How can I put this…
Let me tell you a story.
Someone in our area won the lottery the other day.
Multiple-millions.
Imagine you had just won the lottery, and you went and put all that money in your bank account.
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that you are unable to work or make any kind of a living, and that this is the only bank in the world…and that it is also uninsured.
After taxes and everything, you cleared around 42 million dollars.
That’s a lot of money, right? A lot of potential.
Now imagine going to check your bank account the next day only to find that your bank had been hacked and you were completely locked out of your account, and for whatever reason, you were unable to close your current account or open another one.
The hackers had physically taken over all the bank locations, servers, backups and everything.
Not only that, but they had gained complete access to your account, your ONLY account, which is for all intents and purposes, your life-savings.
You have no other means of income and can not make any more deposits.
This account is all the money in the world you have to pay rent, pay bills, to buy groceries… to LIVE.
You don’t know how much money you have left. You don’t know if you have ANY money left.
Cyber-security is unable to do anything to get rid of the hackers or restore your account. They can’t even get you a current balance.
You ARE able to make small withdrawals (Assuming you still have money left).
You might be broke and you wouldn’t even know it.
Maybe you could put food on the table today, but maybe you couldn’t tomorrow.
How would you feel? Scary right?
————-
In case you missed the analogy, that scenario is our very existence in this world.
Let’s pretend one dollar is the equivalent of one minute of our lives.
If we live to be 80, that’s roughly 42 million minutes in a lifetime.
We will spend around 14 million of that on “sleep.”
But that’s still 28 million we have left to spend, right?
In theory…
But there’s this hacker called “life” that has gained full access and locked us out of that account and won’t even allow us to “check our account balance.”
“Life” may have gone through and cleaned out our account, and we wouldn’t know it until we were “BROKE” [IN ALL CAPS].
Yet, whatever currency remains in this account is the ONLY resource we have to survive.
So, knowing that, what’s a “dollar” worth to us?
Would you spend that money differently knowing you might not have any left?
Most of us are willing to fork over a dollar for a good app, but how would we feel if TikTok made us pay a dollar for EVERY SINGLE one-minute random clip we watched while scrolling? How much would we be paying?
And yet that’s what we do, isn’t it? If one minute of our life was one dollar, we are spending 10 grand EVERY WEEK.
Ten thousand dollars a week out of a compromised account, that could be depleted any day… and we fully expect to wake up and have plenty of “money” to go around tomorrow.
And we waste our “money” on such stupid stuff.
I used to play a video game that kept track of how much time you logged on it and some people had logged over a FULL YEAR of playing time. In money terms, that would be like spending over HALF A MILLION DOLLARS on that video game.
I would probably be mortified at the amount of time I have spent on Facebook and social media, especially if it was put into “money terms.”
(I don’t even want to think about opening my “usage time” on my phone)…
Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook, I like social media and keeping up with my friends and family. But even if I only spent an hour each day on social media, is it worth $60/day to me?
😬
I’m 41. That’s almost 22 million minutes I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to spend in my life thus far.
Many people won’t get this much to spend. (Many haven’t.)
So how much “money” is realistically left for me?
If “life” never touched my account, I would have what… around 13-14 million WAKING minutes in my “account.” AT MOST.
And without any outside influence I am spending around 40 grand EVERY MONTH out of my account. My “compromised account.”
FORTY THOUSAND “DOLLARS” A MONTH.
How is that sustainable?
Simply put, “it’s not.”
Whether stolen or withdrawn, we will spend EVERYTHING in our account until it’s gone.
We WILL lose all our “money.” We WILL go broke. It could literally happen tomorrow.
One day, it WILL happen tomorrow.
And we will wake up “tomorrow” with plans for the day, and plans for the evening and plans for the next day… and we will go to our “account” and try to withdraw that $1400 of time that we spend EVERY SINGLE DAY and find that we are suddenly “overdrawn” and out of “time.”
Poof.
Gone.
What did I spend the last of my “resources” on? Checking Facebook? Scrolling TikTok?
Whether life steals all my “money,” or I spend it all myself, I hope I’m happy with whatever I’ve purchased with the resources that were granted to me.
Because I don’t want to spend the last of my precious moments on anything less than something TRULY worth the blessing of one more minute of my life.
Why have I not been on Facebook?
Simply (and existentially) put, “I haven’t had the time.”
——
(Thank you for the investment of the three minutes you have spent reading this. I do hope you gain a meaningful return on it.)