What Happened to Self-Assurance and Why We Are All Looking for a Sign
Whatever happened to self-assurance? And did we have it in the first place?
Happy Sundaze, my loves!
This week’s newsletter comes at you a little late, because life has been busy recently and I simply didn’t get enough time to finish and sub what I’d been working on. I’m still trying not to beat myself up about it! Funnily enough, when I sat down on Thursday evening with a cup of tea to look at my rough draft, I realised that that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about at all. Not this week anyway. It was the writers’ breakthrough that I desperately needed. Since I spend all of my work days crafting copy, it’s no wonder that, come evening, my mind is just exhausted.
Today marks two weeks of a social media detox that I’d been thinking about doing for ages. It’s been a quiet, contemplative fortnight and I woke up this morning feeling more clarity than I had in weeks, perhaps even months.
“If it’s not sunny, it’s a sign I shouldn’t go out to the gym,”
“It’s 11.11, that means I’m on the right path,”
“50 people liked my post, this must mean I’m doing things properly; the most-liked way,”
I could go on and on (and on) with more examples of everyday occurrences that we force to become signs.
To be honest, I often seek out deeper meanings from the world around me. If it’s rainy out, it can be a sign that we shouldn’t go out for we’d catch a cold. And, naturally, the human brain does connect herd mentality with correctness. Taking some time away from social media has given me crystal-clear headspace to become more present and attuned to the world around me. For the first time in a long time, I’m not looking elsewhere for self-assurance, I’m… believing that I just can? I don’t have to poll an audience, or check that somebody else has tried out that product, or assign meaning to the curious coincidences of everyday life. It’s refreshing.
So, what happened to self-assurance?
When we look for a sign, it’s often because some part of us is seeking acknowledgement of something that’s already on our mind. Are we all overthinking things more than we did 5, 10 years ago? I believe so. Our brains are hardwired to affirm what we already believe: try as you may to convince yourself that you’re the anomaly, we’re all as flawed as each other and it’s monumentally difficult to change your own mind. Also known as confirmation bias, people will often look for ‘signs’ to self-assure that we’re doing the right thing. The hard truth? Nobody knows what they’re doing, or what the ‘right thing’ is. The goalposts are forever moving.
Self-assurance has taken a real knock in the dawn of post-pandemic1 life and as the use of social media has completely taken over, decimating real-life interactions. Through a screen and the gossamer-thin veil of words and photographs, our sentiments can lose clarity. How many hours have you and your friends spent deciphering what a message from a man meant? Or whether you sounded ‘off’ because an email wasn’t friendly enough? And have you too painstakingly questioned whether people online will mistake your naively posted Instagram photo dump as a humble brag, so you deleted it altogether? Me too, pal.
A lack of clarity also causes people to unwaveringly look for a sign that what we’re doing is right, to crave a herd mentality that we’re in things together. In a world where, increasingly, everything has a metric, it is all too easy to feel like we need the assurance of others and volumes of likes in order to have made the right decision, to have made it at all. I believe whatever self-assurance we worked towards after mandatory education has slowly been chipped away at in this digital era. Sure, I love the Internet and my online community. But do I love what it’s done to my outlook and personal mindset? Not always.
Sometimes, looking for a sign is the sign. It’s a signal that we need to slow down and become more present. Consider, and properly see, what is in front of us and quietly make informed – or uninformed! – decisions based on what you’re confronted with. To push for a promotion or move to a new company? Vanilla Danish or pain au chocolat? Reply now or respond in three, cool-girl days? (FYI, it’s push for the promotion, vegan vanilla Danish from Blank Street, and reply now!) Spending time away from the fast-paced world and constant churn of social media has only been positive for my little brain. At last, she’s slowly believing in herself again.
I know the pandemic isn’t over, far from it in fact, but I’m using this term to describe post-lockdown life.
Great post! I'm a very woo-woo spiritual person but I'm also stubborn and try to stay grounded. So, if I see a something that could be considered a sign I talk myself out but then I'll constantly see that same sign over and over again which frustrates me. Is it me wanting to believed that the sign was meant for me or is the universe being stubborn against me? 😂
"Sometimes, looking for a sign is the sign. It’s a signal that we need to slow down and become more present." - I'm going to need 8-10 business days to digest this one.
A HUGE congrats on going two weeks without social media! This reminded me of week 4 of the Artist's Way program where I had to go a week of full deprivation (no reading, no socials, no tv) and I nearly had a mental breakdown -- okay fine, I did in fact have multiple mental breakdowns. It was excruciating, but it also laid out a very hard truth of how heavily I had been consuming content. While the point of this deprivation week was to create more art, I found myself so depleted and experiencing something akin to withdrawal symptoms? But then the following week, I felt overstimulated coming back to it all and while I was excited to go back to my old ways, I realized that my brain couldn't actually handle it. It was an eye-opening experience!
I especially resonated with the concept of looking for signs or making meaning of anything and everything. While there's a part of me that will always seek connection, look for synchronous moments and the magic that exists in our daily lives, you're absolutely right on how this need for meaning becomes so clouded and murky through the use of social media which transitioned it into this pervasive desire for self-assurance and validation. I am so guilty of seeking that out myself, and while I may not do the full deprivation that I had to during that particular week (because I wasn't allowed to read BOOKS!!), I'm definitely curious and keen to try a social media detox like the one that you did. Thank you for sharing this experience with us! It's really exciting and beautiful to see how rejuvenated and clear it's made you feel.
(A side note: Can I also just say that having previously worked in a host of communications departments and moving away from writing/content-creation as my 9-5, I am so wildly impressed by the fact that you write copy all day for work and still continue to make space to write on your blog and this newsletter?! That is so impressive!)