– Nhat Hanh
I’ve been watching a drama unfold on a Facebook page that is run by a woman who transforms photos into unique creations with inspirational sayings on them. As she has an astounding number of ‘Likes,’ I’ve been studying what she’s doing and why her page is so popular. At first, it seemed that she was just very good at making people feel as they wanted to feel, whether that was uplifted and inspired or simply justified in feeling however they might be feeling. Then she started getting angry and using her page as a platform to vent about stuff that makes her mad, such as copyright infringement and how things should and should not be shared on the internet. At that point, the tide turned against her: commenters started to react negatively and to ‘unLike’ her page. The more she tells people what she doesn’t like and doesn’t want, the more people seem to do the very thing she doesn’t want them to do, and the more negativity she receives in response to her protests. Instead of her page bringing her joy and success as it did when she was keeping it positive, she is now so stressed out that she is taking a vacation from Facebook. Watching all of this has been a great study in how we get back what we send out into the world: If what we want is love, kindness and appreciation, then we are wise to infuse all we think, say, do and create with those positive energies.