Sucked in by the Media and Facebook

How many hours a day or a week do we get involved with the above?

How good do we feel at the end of spending that time?

Compare how many hours a day do we spend doing something solely for ourselves?

And how good do we feel at the end of that time?

Spending time with the first choice could mean:

Following the news - at the moment there's the shooting in the Ukraine and Celebrity watch - Rebekah Brooks. Just recently there was refugees from Syria and Nigela Lawson. Further back there was the Philippines a Jonathan Ross. Libya etc etc

Then on Facebook we get dragged into reading a lot of trivia, to which we leave our rather superficial messages and we feel one of the 'in crowd'. People who do it claim that it's addictive.

Doing things solely for ourselves in my book includes cooking from basic ingredients; perhaps even  creating our own dishes, DIY, knitting, reading books of all kinds, making our home/garden more 'friendly', talking face-to-face with local people - over the phone, in the pub, in the street -  playing a musical instrument, working on the allotment, attending/ being part of a group - knit and natter, chess, pool, family history, political party, crafts of all kind, help running a service like a charity shop. Also meeting with others in a religious activity though my fear here is of the brainwashing that often goes on - that's another topic for my blog!). Yes and it includes going out for a meal in different ways going out to a commercial activity - football match, film,theatre,'things' at the Coro. It even includes spending time with our children or grandchildren in such a way that develops their (and your) personality or interests, an alternative to the mind grabbing tele, ipad, ipod, computer games, mobile phone - eg building stuff with Lego, reading books together, doing creative things together such as : cooking, painting, crafts like making popup cards, pottery, or any 'hobby'.

We could even get involved with others to improve our environment : campaigning for change - retaining a bus service, repairs on the road ( it's an accepted fact that those the shout loudest and to the right person get good service(here I've found putting a video on Youtube works wonders), improving our local park, tidying our street.

So we seem to have a choice : passive involvement where we watch others and maybe even moan and gripe or active involvement where we do something ourselves and ignore the media Facebook world.

At the end of the day it's worth asking ourselves which of the many ways that we spend our time do we enjoy most. Then making a decision to do more of it. The saddest outcome is spending a large part of the day feeling fed-up - it's not good for us or for those around us!