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Why I had to quit social media
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- People without social media accounts are kind of weird right? How could somebody in this day and age remain shrouded in anonymity. If you're addicted to social media, keep reading. This might open your eyes. When I had my Facebook account I noticed I was sort of depressed and generally unhappy. After deleting my account, I can see why.
One thing I noticed was the separation caused in my family. I am an introvert so naturally I don't really talk to people, including my own family. But during family gatherings it was always nice to see relatives that are distantly lovable. Breaking apart from social media, I see how certain family members' pride is interwoven into their accounts. Not wishing somebody happy birthday (which I never would have done over the phone before SM) or congratulating them on an irrelevant and/or undeserving boast, drew a thick divide between that person and myself. So thick that I saw this specific individual at my aunts birthday party one week before Christmas, completely giving me the cold shoulder the entire time and not acknowledging my presence. I'm not going to earn the love of my family by enabling their egotistical necessities.
Another thing I noticed was the abundance of disgusting pictures, videos, and news stories. I saw the video of sheep being beaten while their wool was savagely sheared off, every one of them bleeding... everywhere. I saw the video of the dogs being punched in the face and hit with baseball bats in a building and by people that looked reminiscent of the building and people in the sheep video. I saw the video of the newly hatched chicks riding on a conveyor belt to their demise in a grinder. Such short and sad lives. I saw the endless pictures of gruesomely deformed babies. A picture of two guys holding a knife in one hand and a dogs ear in the other while an earless dog sits mortified but still loyally between them. This stuff is disgusting. I'm sure it's to raise awareness but there are better ways. Does an occasional funny meme or funny cat video negate the horrors that can imprint on your brain from this stuff? I really don't think so. I can remember the things I previously mentioned a lot clearer than any funny video, even though I try very hard not to. Imagine what this does to a child's mind. I saw this garbage when I was between 22-29, not 5 or 6!
Another thing. My girlfriend. She has a Facebook account. Big surprise. What was really surprising was how distant we were when we were together. You hear this all the time but it's so true. I find myself (still) yelling at her to put her phone down when we're watching a movie. Eating dinner. Anything. She would be completely fine on another planet, so long as she has an internet connection and her phone. Joe Rogan mentioned in one of his podcasts that when his daughters friends come over to his house to play, they have to surrender their phones until they leave. I completely agree with this. If it were a "dumb" phone, AKA a phone without internet, this would cause major concern. Why would you take a little girls phone away while she's at your house? Creep. But having internet means having Facebook. Which means while the girls are together, they are still miles apart. Take the social media away from smart phones and there's really nothing so engrossing that your attention can't be broken. Games can be passed over to friends, news articles/information are usually verbally shared. Social media is private. Non-inclusive.
Lastly, I want to mention what did it for me. What made my turn my head away from my phone and see the world in front of me. Because if everyone doesn't do that, what's the point of our physical existence? Why produce or maintain beautiful architecture? You'll stand in front of it staring at your phone, missing what's IRL. A simple video did it for me. A video I saw on Facebook ironically. It was a video of a young lady walking directly into a water fountain in a shopping mall while staring at her phone. She didn't see the fountain in front of her and did a front flip into the water. Simple. Kind of funny. But I realized there was some Inception stuff going on. I'm watching a video of a young woman.. probably smart, zombified by her phone. And there I am, zombified, watching a woman, watching a phone, falling into a fountain. What if that were a car instead of a fountain? What if there was a car headed towards me while I'm watching the fountain video? So there was that, plus the revelations of the Facebook scandals. The selling of personal information. The proven fake news articles. Etcetera, etcetera.
The moral of the story: Pay attention to the things and people around you. That's it! Just try to recall how many times you saw urgent information on any social media and said "Oh My God!" out loud. Maybe once. Probably never. If you did it's definitely something you would have found out by text or a phone call from someone important to you. Social media is unnecessary. Put your phone down. You can do it.
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January 11, 2019 at 04:33PM