Why We Need WordPress

Every week seems to bring unwelcome news from a new corner of the globe. Death in Syria, a massacre of innocents in Newtown, hurricanes in New York, gridlock in Washington, and the list is endless. You can try to unplug from all of this, but only if you unplug from life itself. Perhaps it all seems so much more pervasive because we have so many more media outlets inundating our lives.

But if that’s true, where then are the uplifting stories? Where are the tales of human heroism that lift us beyond our everyday blues and reveals the true range of human experience? Why aren’t these stories profiled more?

Much like the gluttony of Wall Street, main stream media is obsessed with the belief that the only thing that sells is grief and despair. Don’t get me wrong; to overcome evil, we must be vigilant about the abuses we humans bestow upon one another. We cannot stick our head in a bucket of flowers and hope that things get better. But to get better, we need inspiration. We need stories of triumph and victory. We need to be able to imagine and create.

How, then, do we tap into that inspiration if it is so miserably doled out? How might we convince the media that there’s money to be found in hope?

WordPress is so much more than a place to deposit our mental meanderings and provide snapshots of our lives. I spend my fair share of time on WordPress, a preeminent social interactive outlet of our day. To be sure, I do so because it is a source of inspiration, albeit a vicarious one. On its pages I read story after story of shared love, creativity, hope, and shared promise. Most of it from contributors I really don’t know, but the threads of our lives are imperceptibly bound, and so I delight in the photos, the wealth of talent of emerging writers, and watching a new generation move out into and experience their worlds. I revel in the creative outpouring of strangers, reminding us that the true nature of humanity is to seek higher ground and to give voice to our inner genius. I am inspired by the artistic, the storytellers, and the spirituality.

It just makes me feel good, if only for a moment.

Curiously, I don’t see a lot of call for sharing misery; that seems to be because WordPress’s design is at its core inspirational. On its pages we get to live the vicarious joys and triumphs of our fellow man, awash in creative genius and altruism.

I don’t think WordPress intentionally designed a utopian community bulletin board seeking to share love and joy and hope, but there you have it.

Perhaps one day, our media will be redesigned so that the stories that diminish us will be supplanted by those that lift us up. At its best, WordPress can increase our capacity to love, overcome, and persevere. We already know where to go to get our unfortunate daily fill of grief.

And now we also know where to go to recharge our souls and learn to rebuild our sense of what it truly means to be actualized humans.