Start living your life
A popular measurement of well-being is how socially connected one is. You want to be liked by your family, friends, and acquaintances. Otherwise, you could be allowing loneliness to flourish in your mind. Loneliness is arguably one of the worst feelings to cope with. There is no way to completely eliminate loneliness, but a potential method to minimize it is premeditating actions in public (to a certain limit), so that you may maintain as many social connections as necessary. When taking a shallow look, Social media seems to be a wonderful tool at keeping us connected. With a simple click, I could access hundreds of my Facebook friends: Catch up with a friend on the other side of the world, organize a coffee meetup with some local friends, or update my status for my friends stay in the loop about my life. However, due to the simplicity of accessing extremely personal information of others, the consequences of acting irrationally have exponentially increased with the introduction of social media.
For example, the dating game has been completely shattered and reassembled with the integration of social media. No longer do you have to go on a first date to learn about the background, passions, and leanings of a person. With your thumbs, you could browse one of their many social media accounts about their interests, hobbies, education, and their opinions on matters. Within 30 seconds, you could completely eliminate a person as a potential date. You allow the social media projection of that person to become their real image. You voluntarily forfeit your curiosity to getting to know the person and evaluating them on your own terms. It seems to save you a lot of time. After all, It is the 21st century, the expectation for anything and everything is for it to be done in a short, timely-manner. Patience was a quality previous generations swore by because it attached value to items and relationships, but increasingly discontinued with newer generations. It is unfortunate, but not unexpected. Our ancestors lived their lives slower because of technological limitations.
Two very serious problems arise:
a) You forfeit personal involvement in your life by allowing 3rd party tools (i.e. Facebook, Instagram) to control and manipulate your views of others.
b) Due to the prevalence of social media and your need to appear positively in the eyes of others, you are subdued to act differently in public or online.
If you have not read George Orwell’s 1984 (Psst, you should), 1984 is mainly concerned with the controlling, brainwashing ability an entity might have over a population. As it played out in 1984, the human population was manipulated and controlled by the government (i.e. Big Brother) to extremes that even blatant lies were registered as truths because they were said to be so. Although on a completely different magnitude and direction, parallelism could be drawn out for Social media and Orwell’s idea of Big Brother. If you are a social media user, then social media plays a huge part in your social life and interactions, yet it is controlled by privately owned corporations. In fact, an average first-world person would mostly be active on Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Facebook. Even if you lived in Europe or Asia where WhatsApp is prevalent, it could be unsettling to learn that Facebook owns that too.
It is unjustifiable to claim that these corporations are acting in a Big Brother-like manner without proof, and I will not be throwing such a claim. However, even if they are not doing so maliciously, they still have some control over your life as illustrated in the previous dating example. The social media feed algorithm is extremely complex to predict what should be curated to every specific user. Although this seems to cater to our individual, unique interests, it still hosts the inherent problem of someone or something else dictating what would be the best interaction for you. The algorithms could exponentially evolve until they claim that they could simulate you, but it will never be you. I would suggest taking a moment to think in what ways social media might have influenced your interactions and thoughts on friends.
I might have been coming off as a person that is screaming at you to delete all social media and never look back, but that is not my intention. Through moderate usage, I believe these tools could really be beneficial. Returning to an example that I have mentioned earlier, my ability to talk to a friend on the other side of the globe is extraordinary. If someone moved to a different country a century ago, then that would have been a lifetime farewell for their friends.
On the other hand, I want you to start living your life. Social media is here to stay and already dominates us. Have your presence online but make sure it is only a presence. Do not deprive yourself from involvement in your own life by endlessly scrolling through the never-ending feeds. Do not deprive yourself from exploring people on your own terms and liking. I cannot stress this enough. A social media projection of a person does not tell the complete tale. You could be unintentionally missing on some great companionship. Start being proactive with social media. Don’t only react to the feed that is brought to you by someone. Contact your friends. Use social media for the original reason it was built: the ability to reach someone easily.
You should not feel intimidated or subdued by social media either. If you feel like you hold yourself back from doing certain things or acting in a particular way because you fear appearing foolishly, then you need to learn how to not care about what others think. One of the biggest robbers of enjoyment is the restriction we voluntarily apply on ourselves so that we may appear on a higher note in others’ eyes. You could be wanting to lose yourself while dancing at a party but you are worried about appearing in your friends’ snapchat stories, then you are being restricted. As time passes, I am learning to lower and lower my guard until it is finally non-existent. I have started finding value in my own personal satisfaction and enjoyment over how others view me. It is tragic to live your life the way others would deem appropriate but not you. As a rule of thumb: do what makes you happy before you do what makes others happy.
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