Letter to My Younger Self…
Dear Jamie… the beginning of your social media use is going to start out awesome. You will begin by only occasionally using it, meaning you won’t really experience any stressors for the first two years of use. Social media will first allow you to connect and keep in touch with your friends from other cities and countries. You’ll share photos of your travelling adventures and photos from your dance competitions. During this time, you will have purely positive thoughts and experiences using all social media apps. However, eventually your social media use will increase and so will social media stressors.
Social media stressors can make the online world a difficult place to navigate safely. The two common social media stressors that have affected you are the fear of missing out and social currency. These didn’t used to affect you until you began to use more social media more frequently.
The fear of missing out can stem from the use of turning on notifications for social media apps. If you have notifications on and don’t immediately check your phone you will feel that you are missing out on something. This F.O.M.O will cause very unnecessary stress that you can avoid. Notifications had a major affect on your social media use from around 2014 to the middle of 2016 as you had them on for all your social media apps. This meant that every time you got a notification you would immediately look at your phone and normally open the app and scroll through it for a while. This led to you overusing many of my social media accounts and spending hours a day on different platforms. In the middle of 2016 you turned off all of your notifications for all your social media apps. This has helped you lessen the amount of time you spend on certain social media apps such as; Instagram and Facebook. It has also meant that you have established a more due diligence in checking certain applications at regular intervals throughout business day hours, such as your business email account.
Social currency has caused you to feel negatively about some of the things you have posted because their likes and comments were not as high as they used to be or were on some of your other posts. You weren’t bothered by social currency until around 2015 when you began to post more frequently. Likes and comments are not a sign of true value. What matters most is whether you like the content that you put out. Just because your favourite video that you posted got the least likes doesn’t mean its not good or worthy. Eventually at the end of 2016 you decide to delete a lot of the posts that never got many likes or comments. You deleted these posts because you felt that other people didn’t like them so you shouldn’t either. Later on you will realize that you deleted some of your favourite posts and that the number of likes and comments that you receive on posts don’t really matter. In 2017 you realize that social currency is something you can’t control so you try your best to ignore it. Likes and comments don’t define your personal value. Doing your best to ignore social currency has helped you to not be so attached to social media and not taking likes and comments personally. This outlook change has greatly helped alter your social media use.
To lessen your “unsafe” social media practices I’d suggest that you immediately turn off your notifications to lessen your fear of missing out. I’d also suggest that you focus really hard to not let social currency bother you and try to not take likes and comments personally. Social media can be an amazing place; however, it can also lead to unnecessary stressors. I’d suggest taking social media for what it is and use it as a place for business, entertainment and connecting with friends. However, know that it can cause unnecessary stress and can be a place where negativity can arise. Social media can be a scary place if you use it wrong. Social media will positively impact your life, but will also cause some stress and negativity in your life. Focus on using social media “safely” by turning off unnecessary notifications and not measuring yourself by social currency. If you do these two things social media will become a much healthier place for positivity.
— From 2018 Jamie
