The popularity of social media and reality shows has made it normal to closely follow other people’s—many times total strangers—lives. It’s not uncommon anymore to have followed someone for years, sometimes with incredible detail.

Of course, often we just see the well-known highlight reel people choose to share or the staged and edited version production companies want us to see, which leads to a plethora of other problems. Even so, we still might know the people we follow better than ourselves.

How much are we really inspecting our own lives with smartphones constantly at reach, supplied with endless entertainment, news, and other content? By never taking the time to be in solitude (not just away from people, but away from content, too), we never really learn our intrinsic values and preferences. We don’t know what drives us. We don’t know our passions. Even if we once did, we don’t anymore because we change with time.

No wonder that we often let other’s views of things determine what we do since that’s the only set of values we know.

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