What is Social media doing to us?
In today’s world, being present on social media has become some sort of a required field on people’s personal profiles. Using social media to post pictures, videos, accomplishments, hacks has completely switched the personality of the internet now. Internet was great, I mean it is still great, but it has also started shifting people’s thought processes over time.
I will be lying if I say I don’t use the internet to post pictures, get some likes every once in a while. However, it is important for us to realize the time it is taking away from our precious lives and how it is changing us. It took me some time to comprehend the shifts in personality, the mental health issues, and how overall just a complete waste of time it is and hopefully a random millennial can get through people while they read this!
Followers are your Influencers
When you are heavily involved in social media and have ‘followers’, you tend to wake up every day hoping to see more followers, or even check what new likes and comments are there. Days like today, when you don’t get as many likes, or even get a rough comment from somebody random (who knows? From Ohio?), you will slightly get upset. You might even expend your energy sometimes in responding back, OR even create another post to take an action about that harshness that took your morning peace away. The point to this is, while it is already a hard enough job to be a good citizen, friend, family member, etc. we are adding one extra layer of ‘random’ people who are also in return influencing our behavior. We somehow slowly start becoming validation oriented and we tend to forget what we really want to do with our time and sanity.
Ghostee becomes the Ghoster
Dating apps have been one of the biggest shifts in human personalities. While it is definitely easier to find more people on dating apps swiping left and right, our mind has also added a few more behavioral components in our brain; swipe left, swipe right, ghosting. Swipe left and right have made our emotional intelligence weaker:
- by making quicker judgments on people
- having less tolerance for people
- giving less value to existing important people in our lives. Why do I say this? When we keep getting ghosted, we get used to the idea of this being okay. In return, we start behaving somehow similarly with existing dear people in our lives
The war between Patience and Instant Gratification
While our parents and grandparents used to tell us to be patient and we will get the results of our hard work in time, today instant gratification tells us something else. We are always in constant need of staying up to date with new moves, new trends that everybody is following. This is also one way of social media’s strategies to keep our screen time longer on their dedicated apps. The constant update, every time you scroll up and the page refreshes new content is the biggest indicator of how much instant gratification has taken over our mindset. In reality, we end up not being patient and also get instantly reactive. The instant trigger in our minds has been making us more anxious as human beings.
Social media has originally served a great purpose, keeping in touch with friends and family members. Although it has served a positive purpose in keeping in touch with our families and friends, it has also ingested the layer of ‘random’ that we really do not need in our lives. If we eliminated the extra layer which comes from just not one app, but many, that we need to check first thing in the morning, we would probably have a ‘better’ morning today.
To end this on a good note, it is important to understand for ourselves how much of an impact social media can bring to our lives and have it under control so we can use our valuable time doing something memorable or just being present in the moment. We might get see a positive or different pattern in ourselves. Again, it will take time :)
