Why do people hate making money and building things that benefit them? It makes no sense to me yet ever since the advent of social media, my biggest struggle has been in convincing people to de-value social currency in favor of actual currency.
It started with Myspace picture comments and now it’s Facebook likes and Twitter stats. Those things are only useful if you make them useful towards something, and they are fine as a metric towards that end but if you subjugate that end and make the digital approval of strangers the only currency you traffic in, then you are wasting your life.
That’s just a truism on its own but in regards to people within my sphere, it becomes unconscionable because I’m actually trying to leverage those platforms for things that matter. Thus when people insist on using those things exclusively for things that *don’t* matter – they are not only wasting their own time but they’re undermining what i’m trying to do and trying to make them a part of. It is short-sightedness that I have little tolerance for, especially after the 99th time explaining it.
Not to pick on individuals more than others but to do exactly that for just a moment: I have been unsuccessfully trying to get Anna to leverage Facebook for years but the Likes are more valuable than the dollars the same uploads and efforts she does in Facebook would yield. Same with Anastasia who doesn’t do anything on any social media except Instagram and I can’t get her to do the same things she’s doing there – even if it is literally just embedding the same IG uploads to a brand to build – because again, the immediate social currency isn’t there. The worst (unsurprisingly) though is Wyatt, who is completely obsessed with Twitter and has the nerve to excitedly brag to me how many interactions his tweets yield. It’s infuriating that he insists on getting thousands of twitter views, mentions, replies, and retweets and its all for absolute nothing. His Twitter name is some less character version of “BulletProofDiction” (bltprfdction? idfk) yet he has no blog he either maintains or links to (even to an ancient version) – YET – his display name is his full name… If that sentence wasn’t immediately obvious to you on why and all the reasons it is stupid beyond belief: Brand building means actually building a brand… If he wants it to be his name then it should be a him-centric account promoting his website. It isn’t. If he wants it to be the Twitter for a website he runs, it should be an account for that website that links to it in the bio and in frequent tweets. It doesn’t. It’s the worst of both worlds and is a total waste. and he’s happy to be wasting it all on activity that doesn’t matter.
I don’t know why I can’t drive this simple concept home… It’s not that Twitter doesn’t matter. It’s that he refuses to make Twitter matter. You have it explained to you what to do and what not to do – you claim to agree – you get specific instructions and claim to accept them – and then ignore it all to go right back to whatever you are used to.
How is this not unclear at how insulting and annoying this is?… I didn’t get insulted and annoyed and say I don’t want to work with people like this because they use a micro-blogging communication service. What I hate are instances where their approval-based dog mentality (that I think is gross and that they are gross for embracing instead of fighting) manifest themselves in ways that show a clear ignorance and apathy for the goals and work I am focusing on in addition to the detriment and dead weight in exactly that sector.
It’s like you love raking leaves for the fun of it and because people give you positive attention for it and I say “hey, I actually have a leaf-raking business. Why don’t you keep doing what you’re doing using a LeafMeAlone Inc rake and hat I’ll give you and then when people come to the company because of it, you’ll be a part of that action and increase the attention, love-of-doing, and significance of what you like doing anyway – and you claim to be enthused only for months to go by not doing it and you come up to me expecting me to share your excitement that your non-branded raking got thumbs ups from a tour bus passing by, showing me the pictures of the people in the bus raising their thumbs while I continue putting in the long hours in my leaves removal business I feel strongly about.
STILL they choose familiar-waste-that-feels-fun over new-growth-and-evolution.
Why do people hate progress, productivity and making money so damn much?