Social Media and Reaching Our Limits

There are various upsides to social media, such as receiving the latest news and staying connected with people you may not have the opportunity to see all of the time. However, is social media disconnecting us from ourselves and the people that are right in front of us? Honestly, we are all guilty of this. I often find myself allowing social media to play a critical role in my everyday routines.

To be honest, I even start off the day with social media. After hitting snooze on my alarm maybe 3 or 4 times, I finally tell myself that it’s time to wake up. The first thing I do is usually get on some social media platform to watch a funny video or just see what I missed while sleeping to give myself some more time to wake up before getting out of bed. Even when walking to and from classes, my head is almost always down looking at something on my phone. Honestly, someone could be waving at me or saying my name and I probably wouldn’t even notice. Even during social hour, I have found myself at dinner multiple times with friends and I’ll look up and realize that we have not said a word for maybe 5 minutes because we all have our faces buried so deeply in our phones.

I do believe that with social media can come a lot of good things, however, is it starting to dictate how we live our lives? It is hard to live in the moment of “the now” and actually experience it with the temptation of sharing every waking moment of our lives with our “followers.” People have even gone as far as to allow it to affect their actions by trying to get a funny/crazy video or picture, simply to “do it for the Gram.”

So, when is it too much or too far? Instead of allowing ourselves to become this dependent on our phones as our main form of communication and connection, we need to set limits for ourselves. By doing this, we can allow ourselves to actually rejoin the real world. I am not saying that we need to cut social media out of our lives completely, but perhaps cutting down would be a step in the right direction. Everything in moderation… including social media.