Social Networks: a drug for loneliness

Luca Bertoni
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

I recently lived in a period of my life characterized by loneliness. From this I learned two things: the life of everyone is filled by moments of loneliness and we need to learn as much as we can from these moments, like everytime during our life. Today I am gonna discuss about social networks and how they can affect us during these moments in which we are left alone with ourselves and then we will understand how social networks could become part of our creativity.

A beautiful technological invention

Social Networks are one of the most beautiful technological inventions: they help us connecting to everyone around the world. We can reach out our interests and be notified by each update; we can be in touch with friends and people we know; we can keep ourselves informed about what is going on outside in the world and so on. These are just some “correct usages” of Social Networks, we are gonna see more later. We can see how much powerful are those tools. But sometimes does happen that we end up being alone for many different reasons and this can last for days, weeks, months or just hours or minutes and in this epoque in which we have fancy super-technologically advanced smartphones we can just open up our favourite social network app and connect to people around the world to feel less alone and this could just transform in a dangerous and unhealthy behaviour.

The danger of social networks

Abusing fruits of nature could be dangerous and I think that this may be a case: social networks came out from humans’ hands and being humans part of nature they could be considered a fruit of nature coming from a hard work and cooperation, but, as just said, abusing them could end up in harming ourselves. During loneliness moments we are distracted by negatives thoughts and feelings, we sometimes feel abandoned by everyone and this brings us from reasoning to a flux of uncontrollable thoughts. By trying to quiet down these thoughts we rely upon those tools, in the present case social networks, which distract us and throw away the feeling of loneliness. I would consider this as an abuse (in the sense of miscorrect use) according to what we will define next. As we all know abusing could sometimes lead to addiction and this is the start point of the danger of these instruments. Addiction steals time from our lives by requiring us to satisfy the confused and impulsive desire coming out from wrong opinions, like we need to constantly check for social updates, born from the wrong usage of these utilities. This is obviously a dangerous behaviour for a human being given the fact that the time given to the satisfaction of that desire, which could evolve in necessity at the time in which we behave this way to not hurt ourselves more by means of the fear of facing the problem, is stolen from the time we should dedicate to cure ourselves and our interests: eating healthy, go running and doing physical excercise, reading, exploring the world. This will soon end up in an overload of stress and pathologies. That is the reason of why we could call social networks a “drug for loneliness”. If you think this reflects your inner truths don’t worry, we are gonna figure out the correct usage of social networks and how to manage solitude.

The correct place of social networks in the space-time continuum

Social networks are technological tools made to connect people around the world to each other and to their interests. By this simple assertion we should understand that they are not built to fulfill our loneliness. By connecting people through a simple and fast way we can communicate ideas, build up projects from different parts of the world, share our arts with everyone instantly. This is what should be considered a correct usage of social networks: seeing them as a tool which could help us grow by experiencing more deeply life throughout discussion with people spread on all the globe about our problems, our proposals, our creativity side. This does mean facing different points of view about the same thing coming from the different cultural patterns of thought. Sharing music we produce, drawings we make, ideas we would like to bring to life is the correct usage of these powerful tools by the simple fact that first we start dedicating time to create and at the time that we share what we created, from a simple thought to the most beautiful piece of art, we can only get a positive comeback based on the fact that every critique or appreciation is something which will help us do better and improve ourselves by learning from our mistakes and from listening others. That is why we could define the use of social networks to fulfill our loneliness as an abuse and place social networks in the space-time continuum of arts.

Different ways to manage solitude

We reached the end of the discussion about the danger that social networks could bring us if used in an uncorrect way, as the attempt to cure our loneliness. We have also seen how we can turn a potentially dangerous tool, if not used correctly, into an instrument which could help us grow by letting us express our inner creativity. Let’s now try to find out how to face solitude. Just changing the term to describe those situations in which we are alone with ourselves from loneliness to solitude is a positive attitude to reach what solitude really means: by being a part of our lives solitude is just a gift given to us to let us explore ourself in the nothingness of the chaos of our mind. By exploring our mind during moments of solitude we can concentrate better on our thoughts and find out what do stress us and what we need to change to live a life more in peace with ourself and others. Saying this we conclude we should not try to suppress solitude moments but embrace them and learn as much as we can through the practice of art, reading, music, sport and thinking quietly.

Thanks for reading! Peace and Love :)

On Contemporary Society

Discussing the contemporary society with the aim to inspire people express their creativeness.

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