We are living at a critical point in our history, and our human civilization as we know it is on the verge of a radical transformation.
In our attempt to regain our lost paradise, we can become obsessed with recovering a sense of security, even if it is for just a brief moment. The problem is that we are often looking in the wrong places. It turns out, most things that society promises will bring us happiness never really live up to their expectations. The moral compass that defines our Western societies seems to be pointing us towards decadence; people are moving away from patriotism, religion, and family values, and are falling prey to ideologies that represent the antithesis of those values: intolerance, violence, anti-family agendas, and an overall lack of moral compass.
The shift in values has been a gradual process, it happens without us really noticing, as has been the case throughout history. After all, daily life for most of us is busy, it’s hard to pay attention to how our society has been transforming itself over the decades; most of us think that “Zeitgeist,” the spirit of our times, is defined by humanity itself. But what if that weren’t the case? What if we are falling prey to dark forces that are governing our lives from the shadows?
I INVITE YOU TO JOIN OUR REVOLUTION – the revolution of the awakening souls.
https://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/unnamed.jpg24001500paolahttps://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/logo.pngpaola2023-08-11 11:03:592023-08-11 11:03:59A World of Illusions: My new authored book!
No one can deny that we’re living in a digital world. Day by day, we’re spending more and more of our time staring at screens: checking updates on social media on our smartphones, checking emails from work on our laptops, and watching videos from famous influencers on our tablets.
Without realizing it, we’ve allowed an increasing number of people to influence our perception of reality. You’ve probably already heard in your social circles that “if you don’t post it, it didn’t happen.” What gets posted on social media becomes a “proof of truth” of your whereabouts.
But what happened to the good ol’ times when you used to hang out in secret with friends or your partner, enjoying the thrill of being “just the two of you”? Nowadays, it seems like we can’t live without social acknowledgment from hundreds of others as we post our secret gatherings on social media.
Letting others define who you are has devasting consequences
The power we’re giving away to social platforms—and to letting other people define who we are—has devastating consequences, especially to young people who are still finding themselves.
Just look at the alarming and increasing rates of people experiencing depression worldwide. It’s obvious that we need to flatten this curve and figure out what’s triggering our social media addictions. We need to learn how to disconnect from our online lives so that we can finally dedicate time to ourselves and explore what’s truly meaningful.
So, you might be wondering: “How can I log out from social media and tune into my own life?”
Based on years of self-introspection and observing what’s worked for clients in my coaching practice, here are the top three steps that will help you the most:
1. Recognize that you have an addiction.
The first step is to become aware that excessive use of social media is an addiction, much like an addiction to drugs or alcohol, and it must be treated as such.
As with any other addiction, it’s helpful to ask for help in the beginning. Ask a friend or close relative to help you curb your use of smartphones and other electronic devices. Consider deleting social media apps so they don’t distract you from your home or work life.
The rewarding social stimuli that you get every time you receive a notification on your phone or tablet releases dopamine in your brain, which makes it feel like a pleasant reward. But the unlimited supply of notifications from apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok sets you up to receive a big dopamine influx and, therefore, keeps reinforcing the behavior of checking your phone every time it sounds or vibrates.
A recent review by Harvard University clearly shows that this pattern creates dopamine-driven feedback loops, eventually turning us into addicts and down a path to increased depression, anxiety, and sleep difficulties. By recognizing your addiction, you can make this stop.
2. Make a daily schedule for checking your phone—and stick to it.
I know this isn’t an easy suggestion. It requires willpower and discipline. But as with everything that can be addictive, you need to create a healthy balance that keeps you in control.
Plan specific times, or blocks of time, that you will dedicate to checking social media. Try to stick to this schedule as much as possible. If you don’t follow the schedule to the letter in the beginning, that’s OK, as long as you become consciously aware of it and make an effort to correct your behavior the next time.
With some discipline, you’ll enjoy the new freedom that comes from the practice of dominating your own time and schedule!
3. Reconnect back to your craft.
There once was a time when life’s greatest gifts came from what you could do with your hands. There were no high-tech devices, no outsourcing services, and no one who performed jobs for you. People learned to craft what they needed for themselves. We harvested our own food. Cooked it. Designed and sewed our own clothes. We built our own homes. People used to take pride in what they could do with their bare hands.
In modern times, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship and our love for what we could do with our hands, and we exchanged it for electronic devices and building an online persona.
Why not take time off from your screens and create more things with your hands? You’ll be surprised by how rewarding this is. Take pride in your ability to create and design something by yourself. Whether it’s a table, a house, a painting, or a book, craftmanship is the highest expression of human creativity.
Try it out. Tune out your social media devices and tune into real life. Meet real people in real time, make something with your hands, and fully enjoy these off-screen moments. In them, happiness is guaranteed.
https://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/pexels-photo-3314294.jpeg1300975paolahttps://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/logo.pngpaola2022-04-04 15:08:502022-04-04 15:08:50How to Tune Out Social Media and Tune Into What Gives Your Life Purpose
We are coming to the epicenter in our lifetime where we have to deal with billions of bits of information every day; potentially much more than our brain can really afford to process. This has a huge impact in the quality of life we are having nowadays.
Do you have the sensation that your anxiety level is increasing?
Do you feel bored with your daily routine?
Are you waking up tired and in bad mood more often?
According to the New York Times, a study made in the University of California about data consumption in America revealed that, an average person consumes 34 Gigabytes of information per day. That is according to their study, 350% more than three decades ago!
This is not surprising, considering that in 2020 alone, we have created 2.5 quintillion data bytes per day!
It seems that the amounts are increasing by the millions every second. At the time of writing, there are 4.6 billion internet users worldwide according to Statista; that’s basically 60% of the total world population.
With these overwhelming amounts of data, our brains are struggling to catch up with the new demands, leaving us often exhausted and stressed.
Augusto Cury, a Brazilian psychologist, psychiatrist and author, describes that the most prominent indications of SPA (Accelerated Thinking Symptom) are the following:
An hyper occupied and agitated mind;
Anticipated fear and frustration;
Low resilience levels;
Feeling of tiredness after waking up;
Headaches and muscular pain;
Difficulty to deal with “slow people”;
Lack of concentration and memory.
If you have at least one of this symptoms, you are officially in: You are part of the over stressed, over stimulated, data-obese population.
This fact should alarm us and it should be like a wake up call, to think if this is where we really want to go.
Since the introduction of mass consumption technology, it seems like we have just gone into an endless spiral where the more we consume data, the more we depend on it for everything in our lives. This sets the perfect scenario to bring the so called Internet of Things (IoT) to life.
In a world where is impossible to get “disconnected”, we are creating an overdependence of data, that seems unable to get controlled by itself. Inevitably, we are landing in another sickness, the DIS (Digital Intoxication Syndrome).
When you have crossed the red line, you probably feel familiar with the following:
You feel an aversion to be “bored”. You feel the excessive need to occupy your time; every single minute needs to be spent doing “something”;
No surprising, those times of “doing nothing” end up being invested in checking your emails, mobile, social apps, netflix etc.;
You have a strong dependence on your phone; you cannot stay without it for more than 15 minutes, and you feel a strong desire to wander around in the social media or other pages for one or two hours;
You have a sensation that there is nothing of value outside the “internet”;
You over demand yourself to be always online and available;
Trouble to go to sleep; spend the last minutes of the night “online”;
Feeling of tiredness when you wake up.
What can we do about it?
Consciously or unconsciously, we have accepted this behavior as a new way of living, but it doesn’t have to be like this.
We can decide to disconnect from devices, and connect again to the real world: To go out and have long walks in the parks; to eat an ice cream on a hot sunny day and really enjoy it, without taking out your phone to take a selfie; to spend real quality time with your family and friends where all are looking to each other directly and not with their hands glued to a device.
Like Augusto Cury says in one of his recent books “The Unforgettable Master”: “Is better to be a simple human being that is happy and alive than a hero that is super efficient, but dead”.
We should not let ourselves fall in the contest of the data master. Do you prefer to be the king of the media, who needs to create and consume excessive data to survive, or do you prefer to take life slow, without hurry and appreciate all the beauty and vastness of it?
If a human life is just a very brief moment in time, why not to use this time actually admiring the real world?
Do not let yourself get trap in the false illusion of the online world. Life is here, is running… is now.
https://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/pexels-photo-238480.jpeg13001300paolahttps://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/logo.pngpaola2021-05-28 14:53:202021-05-28 14:53:20Are you Suffering from the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome?
New normal, has many interpretations and it is widely spoken everywhere. It seems to be like the new mantra. But do we really know what does it mean for us? Beyond the question of health…
Is it now the “new normal” that we will be more socially (physically) apart than before?
Is it the “new normal” to forget office life and embrace the new home office modality?
Is it the “new normal” to attend online classes, and forget the good old school days of meeting your friends and waiting at the break time to conspire against the world (or just against the teachers) together?
Is it the “new normal” to transform our consumption habit from “Going out shopping” to “Stay home shopping”? – I still remember the legendary phrase of the infamous Carrie Bradshaw at Sex and the City: “Shopping is my cardio!” well, not anymore, dear. Nowadays you don’t need to even stand up from your bed. Just two finger movements with an app and you get your clothes delivered at home.
If you are in the business world, you might agree with me on this: There is no single day that goes by without hearing the word “digitalization”, or even worse: “digital transformation”.
It’s the topic of the century… there is no single strategy meeting, or corporate strategy goal that does not include these buoyant words.
Karl Schwab, Executive Chairman of the WEF (World Economic Forum) in his recent book called “COVID-19: The Great Reset”- seems to be very enthusiastic about the new digital era; in fact, he predicts that “consumers may prefer automated services to face to face interactions” and adds that “recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and intelligent machines, which will provoke lasting changes in the labor market”.
Before the pandemic, we all understood that the digital era was here to stay; that artificial intelligence is advancing at gigantic spaces in many industries and will indeed represent a big shift in our current way of living.
What is missing for me is the central question, the Elefant in the room: Are we ready for a transformation like this? Are we ready to introduce in an unprecedent rapid and high scale, the so-called Internet of Things? How far are we in our local and global policies, in defining what is the impact of AI in our human affairs? What will change in our human rights? Do we really want this or is this change being imposed on us?
Is there a human right protection law against being dismissed from your job in exchange of a robot? Do we need one? Is there a policy which regulates the human made data? To which extent we can claim property rights of our own information, and where is the limit, when an algorithm picks it up and mixes it with other millions of data to form a new data pattern? Who owns the data?
If I get killed by my own automated driving car, can my family take charges against the self-driving car? Against the company who sold it?
And what does philosophy have to do with all of this?
Apparently, most people perceive AI and the «high tech» to be this technical, science based, geek mysterious subject whereas philosophy sounds more like a subjective, poetical, people of words kind of subject. But if we look a bit deeply, one cannot exist without the other.
I think indeed philosophy lies at the heart of artificial intelligence. As we know from common definition, philosophy is the fundamental study of the human nature, more specifically in the nature of knowledge and existence.
AI is here to stay, so what will it mean to our existence? If the life we used to know will be fully transformed by a new digital world, how will this affect our consciousness, our epistemology?
If a robot will in the future perform the classic human affairs, not only the boring assembly job which is anyway fully automatized nowadays in most industries, but actually we can see not so far from now robot nurses, doctor robots (which exist already in some hospitals in China), self-driving cars, intelligent home devices that will talk to you and do the job for you, robots managing global supply chains, and even the arts cannot not escape; algorithms learn so fast that now are able to compose beautiful songs based on millions of data patterns to create new bars of music.
So where do we fit in all of this?
Isaac Asimov, the famous writer of “I, robot” described three fundamental rules that became the heart of the artificial intelligence era of today:
1.A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The third rule bothers me a little. How can we program a robot that can protect itself without causing any harm at all? How will a robot develop an intuitive thinking like we got after millions of years of evolution, to face such a moral dilemma of deciding what is right or wrong?
Even we, after millions of years of evolution are far from doing this right, as Isamov rightly says: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
I believe philosophy plays a more crucial role than ever before. We are in unprecedented times, and we are urged to think further and consciously about where we are collectively going.
These are not times for being egoistical and worrying just about your own good. These are times where we need to redefine our human philosophy. If a digital era is coming and changing our world, which by the way was a change triggered by us, what does it mean now to be human? What are the new roles in our society? Where do we stand, locally and globally?
How can we regulate this? Where are the values and morals that have defined us for thousands of years? The importance of family as a nuclear entity, the importance of community and the fundamental human need of transcend, to have a mission in life, to have a purpose.
“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?” ― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
In the end, we are the only responsible ones to define our own identity, aren’t we?
https://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/pexels-photo-4604607.jpeg12531880paolahttps://www.paolaknecht.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/logo.pngpaola2021-01-07 18:30:522021-01-07 18:30:52Is AI the New Normal?
