Goodbye Social Media! (For Personal Use)

Social Media isn’t a bad thing, let me start with that.  I can and does do a lot of good.  It connects people in ways that were not possible in the past.  For me, the use of it personally has more cons than pros.  I’m a millennial and I grew up with social media.  It especially became ingrained in my life starting as a teenager.  As I got older though I started to see more of a negative side to it.

I started Facebook just before college, at a time when it was intended for college students and you could only be friends with people of the same network.  Facebook in particular became a habit for me, something I ended up mindlessly opening and checking, even when there wasn’t much of interest on my newsfeed.

Countless hours would be spent feeding my bountiful curiosity on Facebook.  That especially became true when I started Twitter, which is a minefield of rabbit holes.  Twitter, unlike Facebook, really has little boundaries on what sort of content is posted and if one is scrolling throw trending tags, it can be easy to come across something unintended.

I found myself easily sucked into the world of social media.  Even after placing recent limitations, the temptation to check and check again was still there.  With the political strife in America, and everyone thinking they need to thought-vomit to the world, I grew disgusted.  I family members arguing publicly, and it became clear that social media, while not bad in and of itself, does tend to bring out the worst in people.  I am guilty of this too, to my shame.  People use it and do not always treat others with kindness because of the detachment from using a computing device.  To compound this problem, it is my experience that some are using social media as a replacement for real friendships.  There is this sense in western culture that people don’t want to invest in others, and Facebook allows for that insulation to take place.  I’m not interested in having social media replace real Friendships.

So, in light of all this, I deactivated my personal Facebook profile, but my author page is still alive and well since my wife is an admin.  I feel happier as well as spiritually and mentally healthier.  Not everyone has to do what I did.  It was a response to a personal conviction, but I encourage everyone to spend more time in the real world, having real discussions, and not just sitting at a screen thinking that is the same thing. What do you think?  Do you feel like you need to spend less time in front of a screen too?