GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or even just thinking of quitting, please join us! We kindly ask that politics be left out.
You can also click the GUS tag to view all diary posts, or access the GUS Library at dKosopedia for a great list of stop-smoking links. Check it out! Want to make sure you never miss us? Follow (♥) the GUS tag to keep GUS in your Stream and easily find the link to the latest one. It's just that easy!
A message to ALL quitters (and would-be quitters): You don't have to avoid GUS if you have a failed quit. We won't give you a bad time or nag you. We consider the failed quits as "practice" for the real quit.
"Every person that you meet knows something you don't...learn from them."
– H. Jackson Brown Jr.
I grew up in those long-ago days before Google, before the internet, even...that bygone era when you learned stuff in school, or in libraries, or from someone you knew. We all had our sources for common wisdom, information, or plain old gossip: older relatives and family friends, coaches and teachers, clergy, even that extra-savvy kid from school who seemed to know what was going on better than the rest of us. We pieced together clues, took notes, and did our best to retain the useful stuff. It was an imperfect system, but it worked, for the most part.
Now, with information of almost limitless breadth, depth, and complexity quite literally at our fingertips, as close as the nearest keyboard, tablet or smartphone, we take if for granted that we can get the answer to nearly any question that might pop into our heads, with very little effort. "Just Google it," we say; or "...I don't know, let me just look it up" and voila! The answers are there in front of us---and, more often than not, gone just as fast.
In an era of information overload, it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, and we don't even try to retain basic information sometimes. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people unable to provide their own phone number without looking at their phone screen. "I never call myself!" we joke, but a couple of decades ago we would have thought it mind-boggling that someone wouldn't know their own number. Facebook reminds us of birthdays, the GPS talks us through car trips, we get restaurant recommendations and directions from our phones, and the DVR remembers when our favorite shows are on.
Faced with this torrent of info, we sometimes forget that much of this information we access every day is crowd-sourced and that there's a real person behind it---some we know, some (okay, most) we don't, at least not face-to-face. That Yelp reviewer, or the guy rating your hotel on TripAdvisor, or the person editing the Wikipedia page, or blogging about politics, or even the nice folks making up your online support group (Yo!)? Real people, sharing information in ways our parents and grandparents never dreamed of (and not just from their parents' basements, though that's a valid option too; I'm not here to judge!).
It's tempting sometimes to think of that collective knowledge as some kind of formless Internet Behemoth, there when we need it, yet somehow divorced from everyday reality. We treat information and interaction pretty casually these days, secure in the knowledge that we'll find answers to our questions on the fly, forgetting sometimes that we don't always know what questions we should be asking, or that the people we interact with---online and especially in person---might have the knowledge, skills, wisdom, insight, perspective, or empathy that we don't even know we need, and thus never ask for.
And I'm willing to bet that each person reading this has a unique body of knowledge, unexpected skills, hard-earned wisdom and insight, a fresh perspective, and the empathy that comes with community and shared purpose, too.
Why not share it?
Who's Your Little Buddy?
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