Reason #365 why you shouldn't care about consistency

Instagram grid has switched to vertical some weeks ago (feels like yesterday, but probably half a year has gone past at this point - HELP ME). Probably someone was asking for it, while I was waiting that it got more horizontal so I could post analog pictures in peace but alas, Meta continues being the bane of my existence when it comes to breaking my social media experience.

Seriously, I did my birthday party plan with 3 disposable cameras and now I have around 70 pictures that won’t look good on the grid, and I lost access to my old flickr account and I need it back. I’m not even going to talk about what a menace it was to have to change our startup’s social media templates, as if we don’t have anything else to do.

The drama, the horror, a problem I’m unable to solve from a “first-world” perspective, but also, how freaking dull that in an age where we can buy huge-ass screens, we collectively decided on being addicted to our phones instead.

You might be consistent for a very long time, and things change in a single update and now you have to adapt.

Things no longer work in squares. Now you need to think on and upwards.

And as human beings, we like to be dramatic. I think we genuinely are thrilled for that little blood pump that crawls off our chest when we are getting attention, even if it’s the bad kind.

So maybe it isn’t just a grid problem, but a brain problem. Whenever I read books about habits, everyone is raving about consistency, but they omit the part where they have someone else to care for the boring tasks (A rant for another time). And yet, the wrong routine can kill you.

We’ve been so obsessed with being clean lately, we don’t see when we’re overdoing our health, creating eating disorders or body traumas that will take years and years to unfold.

We’ve been so obsessed with being so focused in our careers, we don’t realize when we’re moving straight to burnout like a train that lost its breaks, so now the trend reverts to exactly the opposite and we’re expected to not care about work anymore, as if cruising your life by working on something you truly hate is something to cheer.

It’s like we can only do eight or eighty, no in-between. Is this just another aspect of our stupid humanity that we have to inconsistently remind ourselves we’re not machines by almost breaking our brain cogs because we’ve worked the factory overtime?

But hey, I’ve never been consistent once in my life. I give up on mostly everything I start.

Anyway, back to consistency. I have a big big talk to deliver in less than a month, and I’ve been studying ways I can do it well without any type of visual cues, instead of, you know, practicing it everyday. The issue is that I spend so much time consistently avoiding practice, but now I feel like my outline is still very rough around the edges and it’s my fault for not practicing writing or speaking as much as I wanted to.

There was a time I believed I really sucked at writing, yet, the other day I found one of my little poems, and hot damn, I used to be a good witty writer sometimes, in the way that a toddler could probably say it better than me, but not with as much flare.

I think I lost part of my charm in the last years. I never stopped writing, but instead I stopped being creative and have been more consistent in LinkedIn-speech which by the way, what the fuck are we doing over there?

(Am I allowed to swear on my little rant corner? I hope so, cause nobody reads my diary entries but me anyway).

My braincells trying to be original on LinkedIn

What a bunch of empty words we throw around, wrapped in such professionalism. Go ahead, give us nothing of worth, queen! We became so generally consistent in using the same words, the same chatGPT prompt to give you the three takeaways just like this:

1️⃣We need to enable our neighbors in order to succeed

2️⃣Through fostering these connections we will promote business growth

3️⃣I really love dirty martinis

P.S: I wrote these emojis by hand and not using chatGPT, which was neither smart (wasted time) nor dumb (hey, brain still works).

See, consistency can be REAL bad for you, if you are practicing abilities that will absolutely not serve you on the long run and, if nothing else, because if we are all so consistent at the same things, how boring are we becoming as a society?

It might be in our nature to copy what others are doing, though, but someone needs to break the hamster’s wheel and come up with something new to copy, at least for a couple of weeks.

Scott Westerfeld (the author of Uglies, yes that movie on netflix) wrote on his novel So Yesterday:

“An Innovator friend of Lexa’s had this theory that uppercase was coming back in. That all the Webby kids who’d never hit the shift key in their lives (except to type an @ sign) were about to start putting capitals at the beginning of their sentences, maybe even the first letter of their names and other proper nouns. Lexa didn’t really believe this seismic shift was imminent, but she desperately wanted it to be. Typographical laziness was slowly destroying our culture, according to Lexa and her pals. Inexactitude was death.

I wasn’t clear on the details of the theory. But the concept behind SHIFT was that if enough Trendsetters started using capital letters in their e-mails and posts, maybe the herd would follow.”

Here’s to some Innovator creating a shift to horizontal content to make a comeback.