My love-hate relationship with social media.
How social media is stealing our authenticity and influencing our thoughts and beliefs.
I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I’ve felt it for years, I’ve quit, deleted, reinstalled, and put time limits on something I grew up without, but now can’t imaging living without. As a sociable, inquisitive, communicator, it brings me connection, especially to family and friends who are overseas. But as a sensitive person it brings insecurity, comparison, jealousy, fear of missing out, and inadequacy. Social media is a double-edged sword. It can pull us away from who we are—our quirks, our unfiltered thoughts, our individuality—while at the same time connecting, educating, and inspiring us to new ways of thinking and challenging our beliefs, all whilst having to question; “is it true” with the introduction of AI and a world of misinformation. It’s literally a tangled world wide web which I’m still learning to navigate.
As a dyslexic, information can be displayed in a visual form that is easy for me to understand. In an instant, I can be exposed to cultures, disciplines, and perspectives that would have taken me years to learn in the pre-social-media era. I certainly found social media invaluable when I was navigating going sober in a world where you think everyone else drinks alcohol. Following sober profiles and gaining inspirations from people who I would never normally have crossed paths with from across the globe, who had also taken to plunge into a sober life would never have been available 20 years ago and is something I will be forever grateful for.
My learning about lifestyle medicine and holistic healthcare has led me to read and follow some trail blazing authors and practitioners. Being able to have education on demand with tutorials, lectures, experiments, and conversations with experts which are just a few taps away blows my mind. The right post or thread can spark a curiosity that leads to deeper study, new skills, or a life-changing shift in perspective. This has been so helpful in crafting my own business model.
But there is a darker side: The pressure to curate content and expose your self publicly has led me at times to feel insecure and inadequate. I am inclined to compare myself to others which only inflates my insecurity. Such constant exposure distorts my self-worth, and tempts me to measure my live against others highly edited snippets. Complex issues get reduced to a post that has the potential to greatly impact (negatively or positively) someone else without you even knowing it. There is a weight of responsibility with each word we write that goes relatively uncensored.
Just recently I realised that before 2009 used to sew a lot, I was always making something. After the birth of my third child I stopped making things. I put this down to the busyness of family life and having three small children. On reflection, I realised that this is when Facebook became available on my phone. If I am brutally honest; I can say that over the last sixteen years I have spent, on average, 2 hours a day scrolling. This (if my maths is correct which is questionable) equates to one year and three months of my life in the last sixteen years. The average teenager spends seven and a half hours per day on their phones. That means if they continued over their life span, they would spend a third of their lives on their phones. I’ll let that sit there and for someone else to do the maths. If, at the age of 49, I am struggling to manage my relationship with social media, what is happening to teenagers when their brains do not reach maturity until 24?
We were not designed to be exposed to so much information. Our brains have not adapted over the past 10,000 years, we are still supposed to be in tribes of no more than 150 people. This information overload and highlighted look, sometimes into thousands of peoples lives, is unnatural and signals to our brain that we are unsafe, creating and fuelling anxiety, feelings of isolation, and inadequacy. It robs us of boredom and without boredom we are less likely to be creative. We have developed shorter attention spans which means we are less likely to get into a state of flow, making us hungry for short content and quick dopamine hits, which never satisfies us, creating an addictive feed back loop.
As with all things, I can’t change what others do, but I can change what I do and to some extent, I may influence others in a positive way (I hope). I still need to use social media for work, and it is nice to see what my family and friends are up to (now and again). I therefore made the decision to delete all social media apps off my phone. If I want to check social media then I have to purposefully sit down at my computer. What I have found is that it is not as easy to do, it takes away the automatic reaction to pick up my phone, it’s hard to scroll using a mouse pad, and actually I get bored quite easily. I have read more, sleep better, and gone to bed earlier. I am writing this blog post, which I will post on social media (the irony is not lost on me). I have yet to start sewing again, but lets see what happens, it’s only been two weeks but that is 28 hours.