Why I Quit Social Media
It's the 21st century. We have access to just about anything. Food at our doorsteps with the click of a button, a car to pick us up anywhere we desire, and all the information we'd ever want at the end of a Google search.
But we're losing culture, our touch with nature, social skills, mental health, and our own private alone time. Because alone time is never really alone with 4G LTE. Your concentration is at the mercy of a notification. Your attention is drawn by world news, local news, friend circle news. There is so much to consume you don't know where to begin. Your anxiety is at an all time high because you don't know what do know with yourself, everybody else looks so much happier than you, and the only way to pass the time now is to scroll, scroll, and scroll some more.
Social media, after achieving its goal of connecting everyone, is now just another media source that tries to sell you things. Not only does it promote products like conventional media did, now it does a hell of a good job at selling you lifestyles. It's a whole new level of danger when we realize people are literally telling us to live our lives like theirs. Because our lives are not good enough or something. Confidence, self-esteem, mental health, and productivity are just plunging to an all-time low as we allow ourselves to buy into this impossible standard of perfection and comparison with the rest of the world. And how? With a numbers game?
The other danger of social media is creating an exaggerated image of yourself and who you are. Because we selectively curate our online presence, we show that to the world, and over time start believing it's true ourselves. We think we're some worldly, intelligent, trendy somebody when in reality we're standing on a chair yelling at everyone not to eat so we can 'gram the meal. We write our own bios, and assign our own titles. We lead this fake life and start believing it's who we are. We start thinking we're more popular and therefore "better" than someone else because we have more followers. It's seriously dangerous.
And with industries like fashion and photography that have become so reliant on Instagram to source talent, show work, and connect with others, we now have to compare ourselves to the hundreds of thousands of people who can take pictures and have a "following", whether it's authentic or not. That's not a game I want to play.
I'm tired of this numbers game. I'm tired of this "copycat perfection" lifestyle.