We’re All Addicts Now

Formed in the primordial soup of online forums and mySpace, we’ve long since evolved our daily dosage of the blue Facebook pill, paired with the sleek Instagram cocaine and jittery Snapchat crack — manically mining for meaning from tiny blips on our phone.
All social media platforms are constantly figuring out more psychologically sticky ways to make us engage and stay, because they make more money via advertisers when we do. And that’s precisely what we do — stay and engage, more and more, year over year.
Addiction is the specific disease in which capitalism thrives, as it creates endless demand and gives rise to endless growth and ever-increasing profits — at least until supplies run out and everyone falls apart
Social media isn’t really that human
I was the last generation to experience my teenage years without the internet. The struggle of figuring out how to avoid your family with friends was real. That struggle is SO over — gone the way of over-stretched phone cords and cool square pagers.
Now our friends and family live in our phones — constantly within our reach. The ease of access and thus, disposability of every relationship is a brilliantly lazy part of how we all know and connect with everyone. We don’t need to stress, we’ll just ping them later. It’s cool. Tevs.
The text bubbles pop in and our world sparks briefly— giving us a thin jolt of connection that can’t help but fade and shift to the next pinging thing, before the first ever settled in
At least it’s easier than ever… right?
Social media is much easier than actual socializing — spreading the value placed on connecting so thin it sometimes feels invisible — as if none of us really care that much anyway, we’re just here for the reciprocal dosing of hearts, reactions and comments.
It’s not human-to-human interaction, it’s not even a decent pretense of it. It’s an effortlessly voyeuristic and narcissistic addiction that keeps us hungry and coming back for more. The more people addicted, the more addictive the drug becomes. And here we are.
Social media is a lazy loose simulation of friendship that’s really a space for us to engage in some level of LOOKIT MY AWESOME SAUCE
In search of the apocalypse
Addiction leads to isolation, depression, stress, anxiety — even paranoia, these are known psychological facts. Guess what else has the exact same effect? Social media. The more we use it, the greater our risk of feeling isolated, depressed, stressed, anxious and even paranoid.
We know putting down the phone might be the best thing we do at this point. And yet it’s probably never going to get easier than a global scale apocalyptic event wiping out the cell towers and smart phone infrastructures.
Social media addiction is like sugar addiction: we can see and feel the negative impact of over-usage, but we can’t ever really stop eating or socializing, as these are human fundamentals and the reason why addiction is now threaded into the daily existence of billions of humans
A social media detox
Social media is an unavoidable part of life, but it doesn’t have to hurt our mental and emotional health. What if the core elements of social media were built around the basic principles of face-to-face interactions?
What if we took the time to think and say our own thoughts as we experience them, using our actual face, as we are? No pre-canned profiles, reactions or hearts — just us as we are, right now?
Sisterhood is a new community specifically designed so women can connect face-to-face as we really are — beyond the perfect profiles and homogeneous hearts, to support each other in a safe space designed to be a more honest and healthy way to meet and gather with other amazing women.
Get in on the ground floor: sisterhood.today
