What do you think—if we remove the urge to show people that we have money, and how much we have made, will we still want to make money?
I mean, if we remove the ability to post on social media and show people “success,” what happens to showcasing wealth?
I guess we would still find other ways to flaunt wealth and show how much better we are doing.
Social proof has become a means of validating success, with metrics like earnings, number of followers, reshares, number of cars, and material possessions. These metrics have fundamentally changed society’s psychology—ethically and morally—because it now seems that some morals and ethics are seen as paradoxical to success, or at least paradoxical to showing off success.
I think part of the problem is that we stopped asking the “stupid” questions.
Questions like:
Why did you get that car?
Why did you post that content?
Why did you say that?
Questions that query reason, not to diminish someone’s worth, but to understand purpose.
Maybe—just maybe—if we return to asking those kinds of questions, we can recalibrate. Maybe we can begin to value the things that truly matter again: real solutions, real impact, and forms of progress that place the value of individual lives at the center of what we choose to showcase as social proof of development and improvement.