What We've Become

Unpopular opinion: social media hasn't ruined us—it's just revealed how awful we always were.
— Mark Manson

I think I would say "how awful we've become" rather than "how awful we always were".

For much of human history we lived together, and understood our connection to each other, and our environment. Today we have become so isolated from each other, and nature in our lives that we feel completely cut off. We celebrate independence, despise responsibility, and many of us have developed a huge sense of entitlement where we reject personal accountability when it comes to ourselves, yet hold the world to standards that we could/would never achieve on our own. All of this a result of our mind's desire to be the only source of truth, or control in our lives. For many of us our minds have become the primary, or sometimes sole influence guiding our actions and path through life

We aren't meant to live our lives in a vacuum though. Our lives are a web of relationships, and the more we cut ourselves off from the people, and world around us, the more we cut ourselves off from life. Conversely, when we enrich, and enliven those relationships, we dramatically improve our empathy and understanding of the nuances of life, and become more joyful, and connected to everything around us. Then we aren't able to be so focused and distorted by our own individual desires because we're part of something much bigger, and we feel it. We always have been, many of us just don't realize this