I Don’t Know How To Use Social Media Anymore
Rethinking my relationship to constant connection.
Hello, my name is Amanda, and I’m a social media addict.
I grew up with AIM. Facebook launched when I was in college. Social media and this sense of constant connection and sharing was always…there. Now that I’m in my 30s, I realize, we’re not necessarily meant to live like this. We don’t need to keep tabs on people from every corner of our lives forever. And not everyone deserves access to our lives either.
It used to be that I’d go through my Facebook friends once a year and remove anyone who I didn’t remember. Then it got to be I went through and removed anyone who it’d be weird if I engaged with their posts (what can I say, I’m a “liker”). Then as my husband and I struggled with fertility, I started to “hide” and sometimes unfriend acquaintances who posted nothing but baby content. But as more and more of my peers got to this life stage, I started to wonder…was I going to unfriend everyone who procreated? Would I whittle my nearly 1,000 “friends” down to only my actual real life friends? And if so, what was the point of it? I started to question everything — why I still followed people I didn’t talk to, why I still kept ex boyfriends in my social media sphere. Every time I logged on, something seemed to upset me. I was no longer…
