When we make bargains with ourselves we don't get our highest desires, or needs met, and I quickly realized I'd been low-balling myself, and when I'd get exactly what I asked for, it wasn't the universe's fault that I wasn't happy with the results. Okay, no, I'm not so daft that I believe if the words are spoken, that things will just magically materialize in my life (or not), I do believe in the power of suggestion, and that our subconscious mind has a funny way of taking us to task, and shaping our behavior, but stay with me, because never has this lesson been more clear than when I watched it playing out before my eyes on social media.
As I was becoming increasingly aware of my own mixed up habits, I ran across a glaringly vivid example at the beginning of last year when an old college pal was desperate to find a kidney for her mother. Apparently, the mother's blood type coupled with a rare condition, it makes finding a match incredibly difficult. So her daughter (my friend) went on a social media crusade to find this organ of mythical proportions. She went so far as to hire a photographer to shoot her toddler holding a sign advertising the family's plight -- because we all know nothing grabs attention or sells quite like babies and animals, and all the stops were to be pulled out for this -- picked the perfect photo, wrote a long, emotional letter, and after many sad, and alarming posts, published her masterpiece with the rallying cry for all of her friends to make it go "viral". The problem was, every post she begged for her audience to "make viral" was set to private, or for her friends only ... A few hours later, after no shares and hardly any likes, she posted one of the nastiest rants I've ever seen, calling out all her "phony" friends and family, and berating everyone for their lack of support. Soooo, I kinda had to (gently) mention that the privacy settings she'd chosen coupled with the site's algorithm had the potential to obscure the post's visibility, and asked her if she didn't want her posts public, if she'd mind if we just circulated the photograph of her child ourselves that displayed all of the family's contact information, and if she didn't mind us spreading it on other platforms (twitter, ig, etc.) thinking that in all her (understandable) emotions she'd forgot to adjust her settings. Several people had agreed with me, and were rallying around her to show their support in the thread, encouraging her to guide us to do whatever she needed. The next day the rant was gone, and none of the settings on the posts advertising the need for the new organ were changed. Flash forward to the winter of 2017, and the long suffering mother is STILL no better off finding her organ. Even so, they were able to miraculously find 28 potential donors who were all rejected due to her condition, but I imagine her donor list could've been much longer had the daughter not been sending out these incredibly mixed messages.
Not that her friends list is the entire Universe, but thousands of friends and contacts who, in turn, each have hundreds, and thousands of their own contacts, and so on? We were perfectly poised to canvas a rather large swath of the population, and yet none of us really knew which were the appropriate steps to take, and with no true communication with the woman organizing the effort very few of us, if any, took steps at all. Many people have no qualms circulating tricky posts via copy + paste or screenshots, but when it comes to publishing photographs of another person's child when the main privacy settings are confused, I'm always going to err on the side of caution, and I think that attitude is pretty common among most grown folks.
Moral of the story: The Universe can't make a private post "viral".
