Being reminded of the importance of bumper stickers allows us to stop, take a breath and decide whether our life is on the track we would like it to be.
Driving up Long Street in Cape Town on several occasions in the last two weeks, I saw a massive billboard on the side of one of the office blocks.
It read, "Just be kind".
I suspect that would help with many of the difficulties that many of the residents of Cape Town and the broader regions of South Africa (and I mean the world) are encountering.
Imagine everyone woke up in the morning and read a bumper sticker that read 'Just be kind' and then tried to live by it.
Another version of the bumper sticker is the album cover from the Old Idlewild album, 'Hope is Important'.
I love that album, but I love the name of the album even more.
I know that when hope starts to disappear, everything else is a lot more difficult; therefore, reading the bumper sticker when you wake up in the morning and finding hope can be really important to help you through the day.
Finally, though, all of these things as we frame the way we want to live our lives are set against the backdrop of the fact that, on average, now, everyone in the world spends about 2.5 hours a day on social media.
While there are some benefits to social media, I cannot, for the life of me, see that any of those benefits outweigh the enormous disadvantages to society.
2.5 hours a day is approximately 38 days a year.
That's 38 days a year that people spend on social media when they could be creating something different, something better, when they could be being kind or generating hope.
The other thing about social media is the ability to infinitely scroll, which, I'm reliably informed, sucks half a billion lives out of the world every year in terms of the time spent by people just thumbing up and thumbing up and thumbing up.
We can laugh at bumper stickers, but quotes and bumper stickers allow us to reframe what we want to do without the distraction of everything else from the modern world.
HT to Alex for the heads up on the time we die on social media.
Blog Post Number - 3556
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