Thought of the Day #12

The first step to accepting yourself is to stop comparing yourself to others.

— Joe Duncan

Easier said than done Mr. Duncan. I’m assume he was quoted before the advent of social media. People always compare themselves to someone else, but before social media that pool was relatively small. Maybe just their immediate friends, family and coworkers. And even then they might only share the major events. Marriage. House. Child. Death.

Then along came Facebook. The great people connector. At least that’s what the marketing says. But connecting people doesn’t pay the bills. ‘Generating user engagement’ does. So they add comments. Then they create the concept of ‘liking’ which is the rocket fuel that Facebook really runs on. But even that wasn’t enough because sometimes you might not ‘like’ something, they added reactions. All this is designed with the purpose of keeping its users continually interacting with one another with the insidious side effect of passively training people to derive their self worth from likes. Have you ever posted something on Facebook you thought was funny, or insightful, or simply amazing and not received a single like or comment? How did you feel? And Why?

I was talking to a woman at Chaplin’s the other night, a great ramen restaurant BTW, and she was complaining about how her Facebook page was boring. She wished that people would have more arguments in the comments of her posts. I shit you not. This was a grown woman, with a child, comparing her Facebook page’s lack of petty squabbling to her friends’. This is one of the many ludicrous examples I have experienced first hand when it comes to social media.

I don’t have a single panacea to this. But I do make a conscious effort to stay logged out of Facebook at all times. Instead, I use a program called Buffer to schedule and send all my social media. That way I don’t end up wasting hours of my life just scrolling. And as an added bonus, staying off of social media prevents the notification dopamine drip from starting and lets me do other things like write these posts instead. Ironically, you’re probably reading this because you saw it on social media. Go ahead, like it at your own risk… I dare you.