A toxic person will dominate you behaviorally and emotionally. You will always have to give in to their demands.
Irrational behavior
A toxic person always wants you to behave appropriately and expects high standards of propriety from you. This leads you to always act in fear or act to seek his or her approval. The toxic person however justifies his own irrationality to any extent.
Good communication
A toxic person is clinical and is usually very good with communication. He knows the power of words and uses them to his advantage even when he means nothing or otherwise. He will defeat you intellectually and will make you feel weak.
Projects excessive emotions
A toxic individual projects as if he is overly emotional and sensitive. He uses emotions to justify the toxic behavior. However, in reality, there is no excuse for bad and toxic behavior. A toxic person will set unrealistic expectations from you and will blame you or sulk when they are not fulfilled.
Ego
A toxic individual has a lot of ego. He always wants to win. He is a servant of his ego. Ego is what drives most of his actions and not emotions.
Lack of self-criticism
A toxic person will never self-reflect or think he is wrong. He might fake an apology but deep down he is always right. When he realizes he is wrong, he uses humor to make light of the situation. He makes his grave mistakes appear silly or easily forgivable.
Fearful
A toxic person gets scared and irritated when you start expressing yourself. Toxic people are usually coward and full of pretensions. Once, you start facing up to them, they disintegrate.
A bigger social circle
A toxic person usually has a big social circle. He has lots of friends or acquaintances. He is generally good with people. He is usually successful. But he is toxic to his immediate family and friends.
What drove me to write today is the kind of websites or news suggestions I get from Google. I see a plethora of obscene vulgar headlines about celebrities written to catch eyeballs. I have often instructed Google to not show me such articles, but they crop up on the browser every now and then. You know, I am a young, enthusiastic, driven blogger who is out there kickstarting his career by talking and spreading good. However, what I see around me is filth and the filth is being consumed in huge amount. I know, even I must have read few of such articles, and that’s how Google understands what I want. But trust me, I don’t want to see such articles. I may have stumbled upon them and probably read a few of them. But Google is misunderstanding me. It thinks I am majorly about that. It doesn’t know that 95% of me doesn’t want that or wants different things. There is a great force driving the consumption of such content and Google is just painting the whole town red with “what it thinks we want”. Which is wrong.
Creating obscene, below the belt content is not only a phenomenon that is associated with cheap, crass bloggers, what surprises me is that even good, reputed websites are creating such stories. The internet is full of such agenda driven and below the belt content. I am not saying that every news website is like this. What I am saying is that majority of the websites have such an element that is created specifically to grab eyeballs. Is it bad? See, for a grow up like me, I would simply ignore such things. For me, I don’t even find such stories objectionable, to me they are purely juvenile and even boring. But when I realize that not everyone is my age, my maturity, my background, I really wonder how such stories are consumed. Is this the literature that the current generation is growing up reading. And what I understand from my little bit of research is that such bloggers earn a decent income which fuels their ambition to get on with whatever they are doing.
The way I look at it is that money is making us serve crap. Whatever is selling is being created and produced. And the problem is that it is happening in abundance and with full impunity in the garb of freedom of expression. I am not being moralistic when I say this shouldn’t happen. I am just being commonsensical. That’s why there is some nobility in creating wealth by doing good. And not by doing anything.
I strongly believe that such sites should be ranked lower and lower in search results despite the high number of views they get. Google must develop a mechanism to understand what is good for us and serve us that instead of just profiling us based on few past searches. Google needs to be able to distinguish good versus bad content and penalize such stories or content creators by taking appropriate actions. Google should send out a message that talking about silly things is boring and in professional terms “not recommended”.
Many would argue that Google serves what you earlier searched for. That, there is a supply and demand for this, and it is perfectly economically balanced. To them, I would say that the answer is not so simple. It is often the case of supply creating the demand, and then the demand grows, which is met with further supply.
To the creators
I would urge the creators to create things with a good purpose. Before putting out anything, just pause and see how it could impact others. If you think what you are doing is not having any impact or is having a negligible impact, a price that you think you can pay for few bucks and still be morally upright, then think again. Everyone who reads content is moved. It triggers something in them, if not immediately but it does. And people are what they read. So, if you write stupid things, people move towards stupidity. If you write good things, people move towards goodness. Each and every word has an effect, no matter how insignificant that may sound to you, but it is true. The word “good” is important. This is perhaps the most important word. This word is more important than words like freedom of expression, right, liberty, equality etc. Let’s all understand that.
Today I am going to reflect on the growing addiction of spending time online. The growth of digitization has provided everything at our fingertips. I have personally experienced the urge to buy things that I do not need from popular e commerce sites. And this urge does not go away on its own, it only goes away through motivated actions. You have to work hard to get over it like any other form of addiction. I personally tend to spend several hours scrolling through these websites searching for products that I think I need, and then add them to the cart, only to ponder hard later about their utility. I try hard to find excuses to justify the potential purchase, looking for a reason to give in to that buying urge. At times, I manage to decipher that it is all trap and I close the website. However, at times, I do go through the purchase and end up with the things that I do not need.
Spending time over YouTube is also a similar experience. Watching videos after videos without any purpose. Watching even when you don’t want to, and not being able to snap out of that viewing. If this all sounds familiar to you, then you would agree with me about taking concrete actions to stop this habit.
How bad is online addiction?
Though spending time online appears a perfectly normal endeavor, however, when I try to look for the opportunity loss in it, I find it huge. What troubles me is that you never realize how better off you could have been without it. You do not even know what you are losing because the loss is the lack of growth. I feel the most valuable commodity that we have is time and we seem to care least about how we are using it. Even smart individuals are in a dilemma about using their time in the most efficient way. They think that they would fall behind (so to speak) if they do not remain updated with the goings on in the online world and thus fall prey to the information overload. It is a catch it or lose it situation, we are made to believe. My experience is that most people are gullible nomads in the online world, and they are being used or lured by people who create digital experiences.
An average person spends a huge amount of time surfing net, watching videos on YouTube, and surfing e commerce sites. And all of this is happening because he has nothing else to do. Please understand I am not talking about people who come online to solve a problem. I am talking about people who spend time online. The concept of “spending time” should be reserved to offline world because that is still the real and more fulfilling world. The online world is a world that is meant to solve real world problems. We must use social media to grow and not become a commodity ourselves.
What change should we bring to our online experience?
We must ensure that we are leveraging online world to solve problems. By solving a problem, we might mean learning an online course, gaining perspective, watching informative videos, buying things that we need, connecting where we need to. Different people can moderate their behavior differently. We just need to ensure that the online world must be driven by our needs, and that it shouldn’t drive our needs. Let’s create clear segregation between these two worlds. And let’s give a clear priority to the real world.
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Loneliness is your mind saying to you that you do not want to be surrounded with people. It is a feeling of a social void that you have stumbled upon and that lingers and persists. Loneliness can make you sad or unempathetic (neutral). You may feel content with yourself as there are no social accomplishments that you strive for which can mean that there is nothing lacking. Loneliness can thus induce creativity, improve cognition as there are not many available templates that you derive these from (the templates that come from socializing). However, there is the downside of loneliness too. After all, this is a world where people interact with each other. People who have the ability to be around other people are more likely to live a happy life.
Why loners are at the top?
It is commonsensical that people who socialize more are more likely to succeed as they are good at leveraging other people. However, when it comes to leading people, more so in the manner of either outperforming, showing the way, or achieving breakthroughs, loners are ones. Interpersonal skills and man management skills in the modern world are highly overrated. It runs on the narrative that people management is the end goal which cannot be farther from the truth. Nobody hires a leader to make the people happy. And nobody should. A leader is the one who can be different from the masses. It is a great leadership loss when the leader is held hostage by the requirement of people skills. People management which is different from a leadership role should be viewed with a different lens. Modern management techniques have us wrongly thinking that people managers are the best managers and everyone else is an outlier who should be perished. Everyone is looking for a happy group even at the perils of under-performance. The recent news about Zoom employees layoff and Rohit Sharma replaces Virat Kohli from ODI captaincy underlines this prevalent notion.
Do we need more loners in the world?
If we want greatness, then yes. But then, loneliness is not something that you choose willingly in pursuit of something. It is not a tool that you can use. One can choose to be aloof and cut off from social circles to achieve an objective. But that is more of a sacrifice, a going-against-the-tide and not an intrinsic, natural act to disconnect without any goal. So, yes, sacrifice can also yield great success. And loners who have very less to sacrifice to begin with are likely already on the right track.
Do loners move to top or people become loners after moving to top?
Both ways. People do become loners after moving to top not more so because they become arrogant after tasting success. People become loners because the top is reserved for the loners and is a relatively lonely place. It is not a place which is crowded. The notion that people change after they become successful is flawed because it is the very nature of success. Success induces change and the success exists as long as the change exists. Human being simply hops from one situation to other and simply acclimatizes in the new situation.
Bottom line
Would want to repeat the same line.It is a great leadership loss when the leader is held hostage by the requirement of people skills. In the game of skills, let us not obsess over who is the most fun guy to be around.
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