Transcript

F. O. M. O. · Wanzology

F. O. M. O. Good day. Good day. Good Wednesday. And you know what, if it's Wednesday, it is another episode of WANZOLOGY!! Hey, how you doing? You all right? You good? I hope so. I hope you and yours are battling and winning, not just existing. We have now entered the summertime. Kids are outta school and vacations have started and everyone's gonna be putting things on their social media and there are various. Opinions about social media and how detrimental it is to children's mental development. “A child really shouldn't engage in social media. It's detrimental to their self-esteem and ‘whatnot’”, which may be true, but I'm of the opinion that I need to understand how am I gonna prepare my kid for that? How am I gonna explain or have explained to me so that I can re-explain to my child what all this is. The hardest lesson for us to learn as we're growing up is that opinions are like assholes, everybody has them. The topic I want to talk about today is with everyone going on this ‘vacation’ thing and engaging in their social media, they're going to put up images showing how much fun they're having. How cool they are being in a certain place at a certain time and isn't this beautiful and “Wow, look at us! We're all next to the Grand Canyon!!”, or “We're at the top of the Eiffel Tower, seemingly having the most wonderful time of our lives!!”, and you who will be in-taking this information, you might feel some sort of way that is what they call FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). The fear of missing out causes so much turmoil in a human brain. I really don't understand what took 'em so long to figure that out, especially with young people! When things are being fashioned, when personalities are being developed, you're in constant competition with whoever has the locker next to you or down the row from you. If you are a girl and someone in your class has physically developed faster than you have and therefore is garnering the attention or carries themselves in such a way that it appears they planned it that way and they love the attention, and you're not getting any of that because you haven't developed as quickly as they did. The comparison thing is the actual enemy, not the social media. I don't know about you, but I mean, you know, when I was in middle school, I didn't think very much of myself because I was small, skinny scrawny. I could play sports, but I wasn't very good at them. I was okay, but I even remember in eighth grade trying to play football, man, a wet piece of paper could knock me over, let alone a 160 pound, five foot eight dude! So, I didn't play football, tried to play basketball, but really didn't have the skills to handle the ball. There were kids that were better than I was because they played a lot together. They played seemingly all the time, and when I'd show up, well, yeah, I was the proverbial last person to get picked. Nobody wanted me on their team. I was that kid. I tried to practice by myself, but those things didn't transfer when I got into a group of people, I was too small for wrestling, didn't have the muscle mass. I really didn't like baseball track was like the only thing in junior high/middle school that I actually had a place in. I could do the 60 yard dash, that was it. By the time I got to high school, there was no 60-yard dash. There were all these other things, golf, tennis, try them and never amounted to very much because I didn't have the skill level that it took to be competitive on that level. Now sports is a nice little incubator for comparing yourself to other people because you're in competition with other people. I didn't really succeed in competition with other people, so it was very easy for me to just gently remove myself. But when I went home, I was harboring those feelings of, “Geez, I'm not that good.” You know, you see these other kids that you know, they're coming back from a tournament or back from a game and they're garnishing their winnings and how good they were, and people are giving them attention and compliments, and you're not getting any of that because you didn't participate, your skill level wasn't anywhere near theirs or wasn't close enough. Speaking as the kid who was last to get picked on the kickball team or softball or whatever, I wasn't that good, I really didn't have anyone to practice with to get better. I tried to practice on my own, but obviously you can only do so much. So I totally understand the damage that social media can do because you are showing off the best side of you all the time. There are people who engage with that and ingest that who aren't there. They're not in your shoes. They're not even in your crowd. That's where FOMO kind of incubates. Everybody's out on the weekend, they're at the beach and you're at home inside doing something. You could have been there. So and so went to this concert, Kendrick Lamar, the pictures, oh wow. It was the best concert they'd ever seen. FOMO for me is not the same as it was when I was in high school or college. It's just not, and the hardest thing for a parent to understand is how a child will go through something. It's extremely difficult to develop that level of communication and trust with your child that they will openly and honestly share how they feel. And it's heartbreaking being a parent when you know there's something going on, but they don't feel comfortable sharing it with you. Like most parents, you make the mistake of assuming, you know, because of your experience, forgetting totally that your world was so much different than theirs. In my formative years, there was no cable tv, there was no social media. There were magazines geared strictly and only for teenage girls that had nothing to do with makeup and everything to do with clothes or music. Those things are gone. That mentality is gone. What I learned going through all that was how to be an individual, how to be my own best friend. How to be that one tree that stands apart from the whole group of trees. People are going to be doing things that you wish you could be doing. Hell, people could be going places with their kids. Their kids could be having kids. Depending on your family dynamic, you may not be a part of that. You may be estranged from the mother or from the father of your grand baby. How ya’ feeling about that? Looking at those pictures or having somebody who was with them tell you about it because they didn't want you there or you couldn't be there. FOMO happens all the time. Don't think so. FOMO happens anytime a human being gets into a group of other human beings. We're trained, we're conditioned to look at and judge ourselves based on somebody else, and that's all FOMO is. Fear of missing out is nothing more than, “Golly. That looks like fun. I wish I would've done that.”, “I wish I had money. I could be out on a boat. It's 85 degrees and I wish I could be on that boat. Water skiing and having fun with those guys.”, “I wish I had enough money to get those box seats at the baseball game. I couldn't afford to go.”, “I wish I could play guitar as well as that person.”, “Wow! That's a hell of a drummer right there!” I still have it. I go through FOMO all the time. The only way that I learned, and I can't say that I'm good at it. I'm still trying to learn how to get that comparison monkey off my back. I am known for singing the hook on “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. People tend to forget that that song came out in the summer of 2012. Last time I looked at the calendar, it's nowhere near 2012 anymore, and it's like for once in my life I did something that a whole slew of people appreciated. I had achieved a level that I had only dreamed of and had given up on that dream, so it came completely outta left field for me. But I'll tell you what I've learned that the comparison that I used to make myself versus Charlie Puth or Usher, or Gerald Levert. I can't sing like those people. I can only sing like me. It was very, very difficult to get right with that today, it's still difficult to get right with that. When you compare yourself, be it your body appearance, be it the level of income and, and things you're able to afford and you're out in public, the comparison thing happens whether you like it or not, but the only defense against it is realizing that what you have is what YOU and only you have. That other person doesn't have what you have. It's very interesting. When I'm cruising through, looking at reels on Instagram, I've become a fan of heavy girls with big boobs, not because I'm attracted to heavy girls in big boobs, although I like boobs. But I look at them and how they, how they present themselves and the women with like really, really huge boobs, they get a lot of flack from people because it's like the bearded lady at the circus or something. But I listen to how they talk and what they say. Those women, those young women and, and older women, they got it going on. Why? Because they could give a rat's ‘pet-tooie’ about what somebody else thinks and I know it was mentally a lot of work to get there. I know, well, I don't know. I can imagine that there are times that they really wish they were a size zero to four to wear this cool dress on a red carpet or something like that. That's what the industry does. Look at Lizzo. Look at pink. Look at Meghan Trainor. I just saw Meghan Trainor on a commercial, she's lost a lot of weight. When's the last time you saw a Wayfair commercial? Kelly Clarkson didn't always look like that and this is what happens. The machine makes you think that you can't be successful unless you look like or sound like or act like ‘this’ in quotes. It's not true. Everyone knows at the end of the day, you get outta the shower and you're looking in the mirror at that person and there's no clothes, the towel's on the floor, that's who you are. And if you don't like that, you have to start asking why? Why don't you like that? I'm 63 years old. I have a dad bod. I have a tummy. I hate it. I call it a ‘desk baby’. Almost every stitch of clothing that I ever wore when I was touring with Macklemore doesn't fit. And I won't get rid of it because it doesn't fit. 'cause I have memories tied to it. And that's just for me. I don't take those things out and display 'em to anybody else. But when you're standing in that bathroom and you look in that mirror and there's nothing between you and your reflection, what are you telling yourself? Who are you comparing yourself to? And how it's really important to know the ‘how’ of it. How do you compare yourself to others, because that's where the rubber meets the road. It's not that you compare yourself, that's gonna happen, but how you do it, how you do it is what's important. There are still singers that are way better than I am, and I'm different from them. I compare myself to them to see how I can do what they do and still sound like me, because I realized long before I was a studio hook singer, it was very, very difficult for me to be okay with the one thing that I knew I could do better than a lot of other people, which is sing. And it still took me decades to stop comparing myself to, Eddie Veder, Chris Cornell, or Frank Sinatra. I had to learn that I was never gonna be any of them…ever. And I think one of the biggest vindications that came out of the whole thrift shop experience, just look up a song called “Regulators”, Warren G and Nate Dogg, if it hadn't have been for that record, there probably wouldn't have been a place for me, probably not even now, some 12 years later. There's still really not a place for me because comparatively speaking, I'm not like anybody and because I'm not like anybody that makes it difficult for a business, namely a record label, to make money off of me. I will leave you with this, FOMO is going to happen. You are going to look at someone or something and it's gonna make you feel some sort of way. You'll be comparing yourself to that person or those people or those things just because you drive a Volkswagen Passat and you're sitting at a light next to somebody in a Ferrari, sure it's a nice car, but would you really want to own it? I think not. It's gonna happen. I challenge you when these feelings come and you feel like you're missing out on something 'cause somebody else has something or is doing something that you haven't done and they have something you don't have, the challenge is for you to flip the script. What do you have that they haven't got? Who is that person you're looking at in the mirror and what makes that person unique? Newsflash, all of us are unique. All of us. Being unique is the greatest thing a human can do. It sounds simple, it's just not that easy. Like so many things in life when you need to be able to do something, you're not always able to. It takes practice. Fear of missing out. It's that fear part that you're never gonna get ‘it’, that you're not worthy of ‘it’, whatever that it is that you see in somebody else, that's the problem. It is not the missing out, it's the fear of missing out. Fear is the enemy. The sooner that a person doesn't even have to be a child, because I know a lot of adults who are afraid of a lot of things, they will not show themselves, their ‘real selves’, in public. They can't do it. They're afraid of being judged. I could care less. Judge me all you want. You don't know what it's like. None of us knows what it's like to be somebody else. There's nothing wrong with trying, and there's even less wrong with failing. We've kind of been conditioned backwards. People are afraid to put themselves out there because they're afraid of being judged. They're afraid of losing something that they expect to get from other people. Little do they know that that other person is doing exactly the same thing. You always get to be you and there is no one on this planet like you. It's very difficult to imagine. Every person that you see is like a snowflake and no two snowflakes anywhere are exactly alike. FOMO is gonna happen, but you only get to show up as yourself when it happens. So beware what you think because your thoughts can become actions and those actions may not be complimentary to what you are trying to do with your life. Little do you know that just around the corner or way off in the distance or very, very close, is someone who is watching you wishing they could appear like you appear, wishing they could sound like you sound. Wishing that they could ignore what you ignore. Do the things that they can't do for fear of missing out. So go ahead and post the good and the bad and the ugly of your life. It takes courage to do that. It takes courage. But you know, the funny thing is, is everybody knows, everybody knows social media is fake, yet it affects so many people. You can't take what you see as seriously as how you feel. Your feelings will never betray you, but you might not interpret them correctly. You may think you understand what you feel, but you've molded it into something else because FOMO is thinking ‘you should be like’ anyone but you. Like I said. This whole thing is simple. It's just not always that easy. So tomorrow, maybe even today, strip down to your knickers, get all naked, and stand in in front of the mirror and look at every single inch of yourself. It might sound disgusting until you frame it in the sense that every single piece of that person you're looking at has their own unique part and not one cell is like anyone else's. All of you is unique. There's not another model made. You're a collector's item and you didn't even realize it! When you compare yourself to someone else, just respect the uniqueness of both. You can do that. You have things that I don't got that other people don't got. They may not be crawling over broken glass to see you so that they can try to get some of that, and that's just fine. You're not missing anything. You're not missing out on anything. You have everything that you need already. The funny thing is, and the trick is convincing yourself that you have things nobody else does. Think about it. Think about it hard. You're not missing anything. You’re experiencing different things, and that's just one way of looking at it. Don't be so hard on yourself. Remember? Some people don't make it this far, they just don't. But you did. And for that I am extremely grateful. Go forth and conquer your insides so that the outside world doesn't creep in and twist you into something or someone you are not. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate you. I really hope you have a good existence 'cause God knows what's coming…you don't. Take good care of yourselves. I'll talk to you next week.