There’s a currency that has completely destabalised the world and it’s not ‘Bitcoin’, ‘Dogecoin’ or ‘Ripple’.

It’s digital - but it’s not a crypto-currency at all. In this modern age of uber-connectedness ‘value’ is attributed to the dopamine hit received when a post, picture, comment or tweet on a social media platform is liked, loved or shared.

The exploitation of our innate need for acceptance has been the focal point for a re-defined framework of social worth.

Now, a person who doesn’t have the ‘insta-perfect’ life or have the engagement of their peers when they post the ultimate avo-toast, or the ultra-filtered holiday snaps is causing anxiety and stress in generations that have had resilience stolen from them in the most devastating social experiment in the last 30 years.

Once upon a time we used to build our conscience and our moral framework around how and what our families and friends thought about our choices - now complete strangers who have no knowledge or understanding of you, your background or your choices leave comments and feedback and the impact can be brutal.

In the last 5 years we’ve seen the published ‘standard’ of peoples lives escalate - with peer pressure demanding that we show nicer clothes, better holiday locations and highly publicised asset purchases in a no-holds barred highly edited reliving of keeping up with the Joneses... except the Joneses don’t live next door anymore.

They don’t even live in your street - they don’t exist at all.

So desperate and dependant have we become to want to appear affluent and successful - so hungry for the currency of affirmation - we’re slowly selling the last of our innate assets.

We’ve been conned into believing that the opinions of complete strangers matters - and that our worth as humans is contingent on the number of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’ but this currency is utterly value-less. It cannot be traded for anything except our integrity and our mental health and wellbeing.

You don’t have to scratch too hard to uncover that the more ‘perfect’ someone’s life appears on social media - the less together they’ve actually got it. We see a lot of people’s financial situations exposed and to quote an exceptional movie - their ‘ego is writing cheques their body can’t cash’

Of the hundreds of new people we see every year, a vast number of them feel they are behind. They’ve been sold on an illusion and can’t understand why their lives don’t reflect the images that bombard them in the echo-chamber of their virtual lives.

This virtual life is a fraud. It’s a scam. You don’t need to buy it - but you do have to find your own values. It doesn’t make sense to value being filthy rich on the outside... and dirt poor on the inside.