AME: The "Shoulds"

[00:00:00] Alan Mead is a dentist with too much time on his hands and too much recording equipment in his basement. Armed with an obsession to bring entertaining and informative content to the dental world in a way that's never been done before, I give you the Alan Mead experience.

[00:00:29] Well hello and welcome to another episode of the Alan Mead experience. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Mead. I'm a dentist, podcaster and a somewhat conflicted social media user.

[00:00:42] So I'm going to try something a little different today. I actually wrote, I don't know if it was an essay or just some thoughts.

[00:00:50] I wrote them down back in like October. I was listening to a book on Audible and I'll link it in the show notes.

[00:01:00] And the book is called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It's by a guy by the name of Jaren Lanier.

[00:01:10] He's actually like a big, he was a big early computer. He was a tech guru and then he sort of run away from social media. He thinks it's terrible. I gotta say. Interesting read.

[00:01:25] It gave me a lot of things to think about. Most of what he talks about is the effects that it has. Basically his biggest thing is that it's surveillance. We're being surveilled constantly.

[00:01:40] Like there's no privacy and everyone knows anything and part of it is that the fact that we use social media basically gives these companies all kinds of information about us.

[00:01:52] And many times I've said, well it just makes it easier to sell things to me. They make the pitch and then I have to say the algorithm works pretty well on me.

[00:02:03] I get pitched the things that I like to see quite often and I get it at works but he goes into more of the technology and how these companies are not playing fair and all that sort of thing.

[00:02:15] So that's more his take on it. But I've also been thinking a lot lately about how clearly I've been thinking about this for a while because I think I wrote this essay back in October of last year.

[00:02:27] So it's six months ago. I just been thinking about how real life versus my life on social media is so different.

[00:02:37] And I don't seem to have as much connection in real life as I with real people and where I live and stuff. As I do online, it's just a little distressing to me. It's also really weird.

[00:02:52] But I've been thinking about this for a while so I wrote something about it and I was reading and I'm like, yeah, it still holds up. It was pretty good.

[00:02:57] So I think I'm just going to read it. But it'd be interesting to see what you guys think about this. I call this the shoulds.

[00:03:06] What goes into our idea of what you should do? Maybe more importantly, what goes into what we should aspire to do, to have and to be.

[00:03:15] When I was younger, this seemed so much simpler. You should be a good person, whatever that was. You should be kind to others.

[00:03:23] You should work hard in school. You should continue your education so you can have a good job. You should get married and raise a family.

[00:03:32] Most of these things were widely accepted norms from when I was growing up, which would be the 70s and 80s.

[00:03:38] But what's funny about this to me is how we are influenced in our shoulds.

[00:03:44] When I was a kid, how did I know what I should want? TV commercials? My parents? My friends?

[00:03:50] Overwhelmingly, the influences around me were local. Except for the TV commercials, my influences were close to me. I could literally touch them in most cases.

[00:04:01] What influences what I should want and what I should be now? For many of us, myself included, it's the self-administered poison we call social media.

[00:04:11] We fail to recognize that most of social media is trying to sell us something and that social media doesn't require truth to be part of the equation.

[00:04:19] Social media shows us the highlight reels of other people's lives. Social media manipulates our emotions by only showing us the good stuff and maybe not even true stuff.

[00:04:30] And now we base our shoulds on these far away concepts. The problem with these shoulds is how it makes us feel.

[00:04:38] If one of these shoulds makes us feel bad about our reality, we need to take a look at it. Is this should a could?

[00:04:46] What's the difference between coulds and shoulds? Well, I went to the dictionary and when I read should, the very first definition came up was used to indicate obligation, duty or correctness.

[00:05:00] Typically when criticizing someone's actions. When I looked for could, I said could is the past of can. Used to indicate possibility.

[00:05:10] So this is a big difference there. Used to indicate obligation, duty or correctness. Usually used when criticizing someone's actions versus used to indicate possibility.

[00:05:21] Shoulds versus coulds. It's an interesting concept.

[00:05:24] Social media portrays a lot of coulds as shoulds. You should want this. Instead of something being a possibility, it puts a valence of correctness on everything.

[00:05:35] You should want to be rich. You should want to drive an electric car. You should vote for candidate X.

[00:05:42] In other words, you're bad or you're wrong if you don't want something.

[00:05:47] Putting these ideas out there in social media costs essentially nothing to the person putting them out. It doesn't matter if it's true or real, it costs them nothing.

[00:05:56] When we follow someone on social media, we often give them a veil of credibility simply because they're putting out ideas, concepts and shoulds out there.

[00:06:05] If we follow them for a while, they become a part of our online landscape. And frankly, we don't think very hard about it. They become a credible piece of our online landscape.

[00:06:16] Our online landscape seems very real. Obviously there are real people, places and things represented there. But this online landscape is at least partially fictional.

[00:06:25] The internet allows us to portray ourselves, our lives, our products or our situation differently than reality. It makes this so easy as to be almost automatic.

[00:06:35] We need to remember that it's just as easy and just as likely that others are portraying themselves as better than real life.

[00:06:42] Real life is messy. Real life is glorious. Real life is when the smoke follows you wherever you sit by a campfire, but the s'mores still taste amazing.

[00:06:52] Real life is the glory of getting a new car as well as the fact that it will be dusty after a few hundred miles and it won't smell like a new car a few hundred miles after that.

[00:07:01] Real life is the post-op radiograph with a perfect sealer puff one minute in the comments of an unhappy denture patient moments later.

[00:07:10] Social media suggests that there's a world with only upsides and that you should want that.

[00:07:16] If only you made the right decisions, bought the newest technology and had the best team and training that your work life would be stress free and profitable.

[00:07:25] But that's not real life. Even if you do everything right, it's not real life.

[00:07:28] So join me in embracing real life. Celebrate the occasional train wreck patient that makes terrible choices but keeps showing up because they like you and they think you're the best dentist they've ever had.

[00:07:40] Join authentic colleagues to complain about the profession knowing you'll dive right back in and do your best even though real life rarely looks like Instagram.

[00:07:49] Know that you can make changes. You can sell to a DSO. You can do an endo residency at 50 years old.

[00:07:55] You could leave the profession and start a food truck. And let's be honest, you can seek out the opinions of strangers that post beautiful photos of themselves and their dentistry too.

[00:08:05] But always be in charge of your own shoulds. The only one who can really decide what you should do is you.

[00:08:14] So that was interesting. I've never done that before just reading something like that. I don't think but I think there's a lot there.

[00:08:21] I actually still like the still like it even though it's six months old. So I'll put that link from that book in the show notes and if you guys have any questions or comments or just want to talk about it, we should go to the very dental Facebook group,

[00:08:35] which means go to Facebook, which means you're actually using social media like I am talking about potentially getting rid of it.

[00:08:41] By the way, I've never actually gotten rid of social media. I have been able to dial back a little bit, not a lot.

[00:08:46] I still think about a life without social media and wonder what that would be like. I haven't been brave enough to do that yet.

[00:08:54] I still have some reservations apparently, but just curious what you guys think about this again go to the very little Facebook group on Facebook.

[00:09:02] If you're not a member, you just requested invite and give me a password. The password can be Timmerman can be Lipscomb can be McWethy can be Papa Randy and can be Hornbrook.

[00:09:14] I think I added another one too. I can't even remember, but give me a password. I'll let you in. Sorry password.

[00:09:20] I try to keep it so it's just listeners so it's not quite as much of his garbage dump is the rest of social media is.

[00:09:27] And thank you for listening. We will catch you again soon.

[00:09:43] .