Growing vs Thriving

I think it’s safe to say that very many posts on social media, especially the career focused ones, such as LinkedIn, but also Medium and Substack, are all about “growing” – whatever that means.

They talk about growing your audience, growing your career, and growing your earnings. Whatever you do should, according to those posts, lead to your growth in some way – or else it is a waste of time.

Considering that many people enter these platforms in the first place with an intention to use them as a growth platform, where they can build up an image of themselves, a followership, and become famous, it isn’t strange that all they had on their mind is this.

Another aspect is that many of the growth-promoters are quite young, and their experience with life so far has probably been one where they have been paced through school and further education, being told regular by virtually everybody in their surroundings how important it is to “make it” and not be lazy, not just fly by the wind through life.

They are, in a sense, brainwashed. Whatever free thoughts they may have will be suppressed by this growth mindset they are being taught. And it is for their own good, probably, at least when asking those surroundings who do it to them. They need to fight their way through a tough business world with mass-firings and shifting trends on what employees need to know, so nothing is for sure in life – the only thing that works is to be strong and persistent when it comes to your own survival.

This survival instinct, however, often leads to a somewhat transactional view on life. If everything is about bringing you forward, growing you, there’s no room for supporting others. And this is seen in a peculiar way in those posts: most of them start with an “I”. They are, mostly, about someone’s “personal” idea of the world, using themselves as an example of how to grow. They are telling a presumed success story for others to be amazed of. Officially to learn from, as the majority of the growth-people believe that they are inspirational and have found the real and good way forward, so others can learn from them.

But first of all, the “personal” – isn’t. It is a constructed idea of a person. We have seen waves of such constructed personalities, and, no doubt, some of the actors believe themselves that this is indeed how they are. And so, they become. At least in their way of speaking and behaving. If they have their soul with them in this is a different matter. I can imagine that the distance between their soul (i.e., how they feel about the world, other people, and themselves) and the promoted growth-person can be so big, that this makes them break sooner or later. They’ll wake up one morning with a sense of everything being just wrong, and you will then not hear from them for a couple of months.

They are in some kind of existential crisis, but often it is not recognized as such. It is seen as a “small burnout” – just a few weeks of doing something else, to relax a bit, and then they are ready to go back into the rat race and pursue their growth-journey even further than ever.

They, their surroundings, and their world or followers all believe in that. But it is illusive. What happens is that the followers, on social media, just see something else in their stream than the one who isn’t there. And most of them will not even notice that one is missing.

When they then come back sometime later, they often proclaim with big words “I’m back!”, and people then politely try to “like” and perhaps hide their surprise (as they hadn’t noticed the absence), with a comment about how good it is to see the one back. And then the hamster wheel spins again, the journey continues, and the road forward is the same.

Only – it isn’t. At that time, the magic has gone. Because, now it is only hard work, no longer a genuine feeling of having some kind of mission. Having seen that they are indeed mortal, and that success is not a given, even with hard work and dedication, it can be difficult to find back to the motivation that was driving them previously. And a new motivation isn’t always waiting around the corner.

There is this thing about growth, in a social context, that it makes you speed-blind. You need more and more of it to feel that you are doing well. This is not so different from a big corporation, where the only good quarterly report is one that shows more of everything than the previous one – more turnaround, more sold units, more layoffs, more profit.

But there’s a maximum hight you can fly. For instance, when talking about national economy, or even world economy, you can’t have an ever increasing growth. Sooner or later, your growth will have reached a level where your own all the money in the world, and then you can’t magically add another 10% on top of that in the next quarter.

Realistically speaking, all corporations, countries, worlds, and also growth hackers will reach the ceiling long before they own it all. There is a built-in limiting factor in growing on social media: it depends on selling the idea of “everybody can do it”, and then line up some easy and some tough requirements, and sell yourself as the one who can explain how – if only people follow you, stay persistent in their aim to grow, then they will learn, and then they will succeed. But with hundreds of thousands of followers learning, some might succeed, and they will then be your competitors. Or no one will succeed, and then the glitter goes off the whole entertainment. So, you will either succeed yourself into kind of a death spiral that will increase the limits of your growth, making it harder and harder, and in the end impossible, to grow any further – or you will fail altogether.

It is like Icarus, the ancient greek story about the guy who wanted to fly all the way to the Sun. Of course, that failed, and you should read the story if you don’t know it already, because there’s an old, but true lesson in it. It is not about giving up beforehand, and it is not that you should believe that you can’t do anything; that you are born to fail. It is rather about something different, something realistic: about how there is a limit to everything.

When setting a goal, you may want to aim high, because that will motivate you and inspire others to support you, and then you’ll see how high you eventually do get, but, as you consider it, probably higher than if you had set a low goal from the outset.

But that’s an illusion. The high goal becomes a mantra along the way, and you stop thinking of it as a deliberate “too high” goal – it becomes the real goal that you want to reach, and you may even become more greedy and want to go even further. The growth mindset will mislead your judgement, and you will spend all your resources on aiming for something that isn’t valuable as anything else than a goal. It will not make you any more happy to actually reach it, it will just bring you that flat feeling of having run and run, getting exhausted, but finally you made it to the destination that looked so impossible once – only to discover that you are now in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, with no support from anyone or anything. There is nothing left to do here, other than set a new goal, or, probably, try to find your way back home.

On social media, the growth idea mostly follow a pattern of publishing a lot, frequently, consistently, and with a very limited value. Each post should, ideally, just confirm some simple belief that your audience has, so that they will feel inclined to click on “like” or otherwise react, which then leads the platform algorithm to promote your post further, and, hence, you have reached a larger audience. You have grown.

And this growth may then be transformed, by ingenious people, or people who are surrounded by some who can drive them to it, into a kind of career that consist of telling others how you were growing, and how they can do the same. You can then sell books about it, give courses on the Internet, and become a keynote speaker at major events, and all of this can pay you a good deal of money. So, you have grown, economically, by growing an image of you being a growing person.

That may be you. You may be destined for this kind of success. But if you do it because you are following someone who spits out five posts a day with something simple that makes you click on like because you agree, you are not growing inside. You are just pleasing that idea of growing by following, which isn’t growth at all. It is merely kind of procrastination, but perhaps not even that – procrastination should be there instead of the real task, that leads you to your goal, but if there is no real task, because you have no goal and you haven’t thought any further than following, reading, and liking some growth-hacker’s posts, then you are not at all on a journey to anything, you are just staying afloat, swimming on the spot, but you are getting nowhere – just living in a dream.

Living in a dream isn’t necessarily bad, though, and we shouldn’t write it off completely. “If you can dream it, you can do it”, is actually a quite clever way of thinking. Everything starts by imagining something, and then getting to know more about the topic and which ways exist to get closer to that dream in reality, making it possible to set a goal. But instead of just looking at maps forever, you should start moving at some time, if you really want to reach that goal. The posts from these people who claim to know the way forward, are not showing you the way. They are, at best, small pieces of a map, but you can’t even trust that the pieces will fit together to become a full map. And even if that should happen, that will not be your journey, it will merely be food for your dream about your journey.

You can’t copy a success. For once, because most of what looks like a success, what is described as such, isn’t. People tend to tell the good things only, and then even overstating them to a level where it becomes a lie. Maybe they believe that this is somehow part of “success” – that it isn’t a single point in the universe, but that it rather has an extent. There is a core of success, but around it a more fluffy sphere of something that could be called “near success-matter”. It isn’t dark matter, far from, it is the visible part of it. Like the glow around a black hole. It could be indicative for a black hole actually being there, that there is some real, solid and dense matter behind the glow, but it could also just be the glow and nothing else. It mostly is.

I like astronomy. It is about dreaming, most of all, because even though you can calculate the orbits of planets, and you can calculate the amount of dark matter, the number of black holes, and even the nature of the glow around the black holes, you can’t touch it. All of what you see and do in that hobby or job, whatever it might be for you, is in your mind. You can write it down, create computer enhanced pictures of remote objects in the universe, and you can predict comets to visit us in years, or even thousands of years from now.

To a very small extent, you may use your knowledge about the universe to build and send out sondes that will make photos of Pluto, spawning discussions of whether it really is a planet or not. You can make astronomy into something real. But by far, most of what is contained in this science, is real in such an abstracted way that it won’t get any influence on your life, other than the one that is purely in your mind. Should you be so lucky to find others to discuss this with, to be social around the universe with, then astronomy can become that imaginary element that can tie people together, like so many other things and ideas. Religion, for instance, or the protection of the environment.

Following a growth-promoter will be a social activity for you, even if you hardly have any contact with the one, or with any of the other followers. Even if it, as it often happens, is just a blind fandom, a pure illusion, a distraction from life, rather than taking part in or training for a journey toward your own growth.

The key point, I think, is whether this makes you thrive.

Think about it – you need food and shelter, and some other basic needs fulfilled. And, according to Maslow, you’ll then start looking for something more, something to make life more fulfilling. When the basic survival has been secured, your brain will need to be ocupied with something else. Mating is one, coming in on a third place, according to Maslow, even though I would say that quite many animals, and especially such as flies and other short-lived creatures, may have a different priority – they may consider mating the main goal in life, before food and shelter.

Next, after mating, which by Maslow is politely mentioned as something around ensuring the reproduction of our species, comes the more mind-related stuff. You will begin seeking a meaning of life itself, now that you have secured its continuation.

But the big question, that I will leave open for you to think about – is the next level of your pyramid of needs to read posts on social media about somebody else’s overstated dream of growing, and their journey toward reaching that dreaming goal, while posting black hole-glow forever, five times a day, consistently?

Will doing that fulfill your needs? Will it make you thrive?

And apart from yourself – you might be an empathetic person who enjoys experiencing other people’s happiness – do you think that these growers are thriving with what they do, or are they themselves trapped by the illusion, not even knowing if there’s a real, massive black hole behind the glow? Maybe they believe that if they just spread the word, this will make it happen, but they are never feeling any excitement of it, because they never get anywhere else than to spreading that word?

Ultimately, we probably need to consider what we would do if not this. What did we do 20 years ago, when social media hadn’t taken off yet? We were following some people through TV and printed magazines. But more remotely, I would claim. We knew that those people on TV were not us. We got a view into their lives, but there was not promise whatsoever that we coul copy it.

And 20 years before that? Well, I remember the printed magazines about famous people having their heydays back then, while TV was still a bit more formal, more focused on movies and news. So, following others was done through a category of magazines that most people wouldn’t admit buying, but they knew them well because they had read them while spending time in a doctor’s waiting room, or while being at the hairdresser.

And another 20 years before that? I wasn’t born then, but people knew about the famous and the rich, and they knew that it had nothing to do with their own destiny. Nothing at all. There were some trends that would bring people forward, an emerging understanding that your destiny wasn’t fixed and ready from birth, and that you could actually do something about it yourself. Something like correspondence courses was big back then. People wanted to grow, and they were eager to take in the inspiration from others who could tell them how to do that. One letter at a time, full of simple thoughts, but with a lengthy subscription to the correspondence course you would eventually get there and become well-equipped for success.

What about 1000 years ago? I don’t know, but would it be so strange to consider that people also back then would be interested in the famous and the rich, somehow hear about those, and, perhaps, be receptacle for claims by the growth-promoters of that time that everybody could do it?

What I’m trying to get to here is that we perhaps shouldn’t blame social media or the growth hackers there for something that may be a natural thing in humans – the dream, that potentially could lead to life improvements. The dream of thriving by growing.

Maybe we have an understanding already from birth, that growing is thriving. Like the baby needs to grow in order to be able to sustain life. That becoming independent is the way forward for anyone seeking to survive. Growing may, actually, be about everything else than the top levels of Maslow’s pyramid – it may be the most natural part of life, coming in at a level below everything else: being the very reason for us to be able to find food and shelter.

And this, built into us, is there, with us, all the way through life. It is our destiny to want to grow up, to grow our family, our flock, our life. We were born to grow.

Growth hacking is life hacking, with this kind of thinking. It is all about being human – about thriving.