Vulnerability

Vulnerability is something that needs to be balanced with strength. While both characteristics are vital and beautiful in their own right, to live a successful life this balance is extremely important. Being too vulnerable can make you blindly susceptible to false outside forces, while being too strong can make you lose out on learning from positive ones. Living a life out of this balance is something that is actually common in today’s society.

There seems to me to be a trend that people are extremely vulnerable to society itself. Humans, especially my own generation and younger, seem to be increasingly willing to be vulnerable to regurgitate what the media, the internet, their parents, their peers, the government and pretty much  anyone tells them.

Although I can think of almost a disgusting amount of examples of things I have come across in my twenty years that has lead me to feel this way, there is a recent one that particularly stands out. A few weeks ago there was a picture of Justin Bieber smoking weed posted to TMZ. Justin’s thousands of young and diluted fangirls were completely devastated. Knowing the power of the internet, someone openly took advantage of the vulnerability of these fangirls buy making it a trend to “cut for Bieber.” They convinced a large group of Justin’s fans to cut themselves until he stops smoking weed. Pictures were posted all over twitter with the hashtag “cutforbieber” of bloody arms of tweens with captions saying things like “I’ll stop when you stop, Justin.” The worst part is the person who started the idea just wanted to see if they could get all of these girls to cut themselves; it had nothing to do with Justin Bieber stopping his smoking.

I want to learn more about why humans are so willing to be vulnerable to so many things that obviously are not positive. Since I am guilty of this as much as everyone else, this project will be a way of understanding how to not waste my own vulnerability on things that aren’t going to help me live a full life.