Mental Health

And I seem to be on a roll again, another week of blogging and commenting on links & readings I came across on the Web! Weeeeeeeee!
Where I comment on topics like: personal branding; workplace burnout; our ways of life isn’t sustainable and we are going nuts; online privacy’s alternative tools.

• Read on Mastodon: “I understand why “we’re secretly ruled by lizard people” is a popular conspiracy theory because the idea that actual humans are doing this to us is intolerable.”
• Read “Everyone’s a sellout now”: kinda ironic that I share this article as someone who is trying to be a content creator on the Internet, but here we are! Still a fascinating read about how personal brands has become a “must”, an obligation, to thrive online: it is everywhere. People dreams to build a following and a community around their fields of interest, and earn a living, but the ways things are in many fields (like in the literary world, or the music industry) kinda destroys the authentic voices. “Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform”; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.” Personal branding, or the invasion of #marketing in our personal lives, makes my eyes roll so much, and I hate it (I knooooooowwwwwww, ironic that I say it as a blogger who tries to get her voice heard). I guess we are all “attention whores” in a way, vying for people’s short attention for our 15 minutes of fame. But we have to “sell” ourselves out more and more now, otherwise we won’t get the job we want, the apartment/house we dream of living in, the relationships we want in our lives, etc. The type of society we live in makes it harder to not get into this painful “marketing” relationship with others, making it difficult to distinguish if our relations are real/authentic or just fake, and making big companies profit from our personal branding’s attempts. Another interesting quote: “In a recent interview with the Guardian, the author Naomi Klein said the biggest change in the world since No Logo, her 1999 book on consumerism and inescapable branding, came out was that “neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security. Plus social media has given us the tools to market ourselves nonstop.””.
• Beautiful picture! Source: https://www.threads.net/@emackphoto/post/C34bLQir0rz
  
• “The way we live in the United States is not normal”: This article was a punch in the guts, very depressing. While it is USA-centric in terms & description of everyday’s life, we Canadians aren’t immune to the Americanisation of our sociopolitical & economic ways of life. The state of our education and health systems are in shambles, we have to pay out of pocket more and more, everything is becoming expensive, and our salaries aren’t on par with the inflation…We are stuck being so busy, but at the same time we feel so lonely. Our society is truly getting worse by trying to follow the American Way of Life & Capitalism, and it just makes us more depressed. I kinda wish to move out of here and go live anywhere but in North America, where life follows another beat, a slower one…
• Twitter thread on workplace burnout: the author attempts to describe why we are seeing more and more people being burnt out by work, and gives a hint on how to slow down (hint: say NO a lot more to not feel overloaded!)
• Link of the week: Awesome Privacy A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy because PRIVACY MATTERS.