Greg Proffit Writing

Category: Journal

  • Thirty

    I’m calling this one thirty because this is my thirtieth straight day of creating a blog post.

    I committed to create 30 posts in 30 days as a challenge to myself. It was an idea I picked up from another source, and was only supposed to be micro-blogging. The thirty essays were only to be 250 words. Most of mine are many times longer. That doesn’t mean they’re many times better for the overabundance of verbiage, but I’ve learned that I finally have some things to write that I’m going to write, damn it. If my writing is read, wonderful. If not…I’m writing. My heartfelt thanks to any of you who have read each one. Wow! Really!

    Thirty of something is not a lot. 

    If you’re looking backward.

    I remember my thirtieth birthday. I couldn’t believe it. But sure enough, that was the number on the cake in front of me. Looking backward seemed like I’d blinked once, sped through my teens, blinked a second time, blew through my early 20’s, got married, became a dad (three times over), and was leaning over to blow out birthday candles.

    I’m on the uphill climb to summit the second set of thirty years since that day. I’ve accumulated 4 more kids in this second batch, and then, halfway into them, my marriage failed. The fallout from that tried to contaminate everything with blame and shame and the ”whys” of bitterness. But, I reconnected with my high school dream girl and the love of my life a dozen years ago. And thanks to God and her, my heart, though bruised, is healed and whole, and better than it ever was. And unbelievably, I’ve got a few more years to go to hit sixty. I’m looking forward to all that they will unveil.

    I can tell you, looking forward from here, trying to bite off thirty more seems pretty daunting. But God willing, I’m pretty sure I can make it. 

    When it comes to writing on purpose, I’ve shamefully waited and wasted a lot of years…a slave to my fears. 

    Not good enough.

    Who do you think you are?

    You have no credentials!

    You’re too old now, you let all the creative years slip away.

    Those and many other thoughts chained me up in a prison I built to keep from trying. I still have those thoughts. They haven’t gone anywhere, but they aren’t going to have the final word.

    Thirty years from now, I won’t look back and regret this effort. I’d be hella heartsick if I never made the attempt.

    I intend that the accomplishment of this 30 in 30 blog posts be only the first of a never-ending string.

    I’ve proved something to myself. It’s a psychological victory. Those are really the only kind that matter.

    Tomorrow, I’ll start on my next 30 day streak. 

    What are some things you want to do in the next 30 days? Can you go ahead and commit?

    Start today. Thirty feels like a lot looking forward, but sitting here this morning, looking back, it’s not so hard. It would have been much harder to deal with more self-regret. I don’t know where this is gonna go, but I’m gonna go for it, for sure!

  • We

    The framers of the United States Constitution faced a daunting task. In 1787, fresh from the heady, yet costly victory of the nine-year Revolutionary War, they met in Philadelphia to formulate the charter documents. After months of debate, sometimes heated, sometimes personal, they penned the preamble to the foundational document of the burgeoning nation, with these words, “We the People…”. 

    Taking an even more granular view, it is evident that the first of these most cherished words is the simple word, pregnant with profound meaning, “We.”

    If enough of us would stop and consider this simple fact, if WE would think of the implications of the use of that word, WE would instantly begin the process that, if followed, would achieve the re-uniting and healing of the Country.

  • To Facebook, or not to Facebook? That is the question.

    Last night I reconnected to Facebook after a multi-year hiatus. I left in anger over the revelation of Facebook’s secret mental health experiment in 2012 that targeted 700,000 users.. Facebook developers decided it would be interesting to see if they could alter user’s behaviors by creating algorithms to display articles, ads, and pages with emotionally negative keywords.

    It turns out they could affect behavior. Specifically, the more users saw negative keywords in their Facebook feeds, the more they began to create posts with similarly negative content. I was outraged. I have a daughter that was in the midst of some severe mental health challenges and I knew she was addicted to Facebook.

    She may or may not have been one of the 700,000 guinea pigs in Facebook’s “research”, but the fact remains that what we are fed by social media algorithms affects what we then “produce”. It turns out that even in the digital world we are what we eat.

    Here we are, years later, now in a toxic political environment threatening our nation, and once again, it’s fueled in large measure by social media. It turns out that the political radicalization has occurred by Facebook suggesting and feeding extreme groups to users based on their past usage patterns. We are all just a “digital profile” based upon the aggregate of our clicks, likes, and time spent on a video, images, etc.

    I’m here for now, but I’m aware and I will keep one foot out the door.

    The story linked below from 2014 has more details about the psychological experiment, and how it was justified by Facebook.

    https://abcnews.go.com/Health/consented-facebooks-social-experiment/story?id=24368579