Monkey see, Monkey do.

Our environment influences what we notice, our preferences and our perspectives. A natural balance of our thoughts and actions occur through a process of osmosis that dilutes or raises their concentrations and their subsequent effects. A happy person in a room full of mourners will soon adjust to come into line with the majority. One raised in a family and town that follows the local football team is quite likely to support the same team, often without ever questioning the reason why.

It is an old idea:
We are what we eat.

What we surround ourselves with becomes our food for thought, word and action. These are the calories we consume that give us the impetus to make our everyday decisions. For achieving individual goals, consuming from the wrong food group creates imbalances between current and desired position. Unchecked and unquestioned, these conflicts create an emotional inequality that further drives psychological and physiological response.

Facebook performed an experiment where they manipulated the feeds of 700 thousand users to show more negative updates and found that these users began posting more negative updates themselves. Besides the ethical questions of Facebook's actions, this gives us fantastic evidence and data on how we react to what we feed our minds.

In order to better nourish personal motivations, spend some time investigating what you already consume. Everything you consume. We can take control of our mental diet by paying attention and filling our metaphorical fridge with the foods of our choice. Though doing so may require throwing away some of what it already contains to make room. By proactively taking responsibility, we can help realign and rebalance our various positions to better suit our personal desires and improve upon them. One caveat would be to make sure the meal is both nutritious and offers variation as the implications of only consuming from one source provides obvious risks.

All in all, we have trained ourselves to become a consumer society and this goes far beyond just the financial purchases from the never ending supply of catalogues, advertisements and social referrals. There are many reasons why we think what we think, say what we say, do what we do. But do we realise them or are we blind passengers chauffeur driven by our manufactured environment.

Note:
Just as I finished this, the title came to mind, born from a saying my dad would say to us:
Monkey see, monkey do.

I only just fully realised the personal implications.

Taraz