Disconnect to Feel Connected

Casually I told my friend “I want to start a Petition for phones to have a screen time limit of 4 hours “

“Crazy! 4 hours is too less. “She exclaimed.

Have a love-hate relationship with social media? Do using social media not add any value to your life? Should you deactivate your accounts?  Does your toothpaste have salt?  Well, you aren’t alone, it is you with 1282892 others feeling this way. Today I’ll tell you something important that at this point should be taught in schools and colleges.

But first, is social media toxic? I took the help of a very complex research method – an Instagram poll. Here’s what I found – 73% of people voted for ‘super’ (why.are.you.here.) and 27 % for ‘the opposite’.  Instead of giving the option of ‘no’ I went with the opposite because I wanted to see if it could be therapeutic to a fraction of the populace. I like everyone else on the internet gave a piece of my mind assuming the position of an expert that social media by itself is not toxic, we need to work on how we use it

Dr Laurie R. Santos, a cognitive psychology professor at Yale who researched on wellbeing and happiness, however, doesn’t share my opinion and for good reason. Turns out I was wrong. Social media is, in fact, bad for us in a myriad of ways. Vogel and colleagues researched the relationship between time spent on Facebook and self-esteem – any guesses? Inverse correlation.

So basically it eats up your time and leaves you feeling bad about yourself and yet there you are, here we are. Why? Spare time? Cultural norm? FOMO (a millennial/gen Z term – Fear Of Missing Out)? Does the current situation tip the equation in favour of social media – making us feel connected? Aren’t we all grateful for the banana bread we had one week straight.

With a pandemic and quarantine, IPhone weekly screen time reports show usage has gone through the roof, and people are ‘horrified’ – not my words those of a writer at the Washington Post. (Travis M Andrews). God bless Apple IPhones for at least giving people a guilt trip and forcing them to face that they are spending way too much time on social media.

Even now people are falling into the vortex of social comparison – how do some people have all the complicated ingredients at home? Where are they getting the motivation for the killer abs workout? While what we see is true, there is another side to the coin- somehow they forgot to post the midnight emotional breakdown, the scream fest that took place as everyone’s on an edge lately. In the words of Dr Santos  ” You are like, ‘This dude is having fun, but he didn’t show me like Thursday night, he showed me Sunday night.” That pretty dish was inedible for all we know – tell yourself social media is an altered reality, a plastic world which might be shiny but is hollow at its core. It is up to us to see it as a toy and play with it as we like or let it turn into a game of Jumanji.

 So if social media is not adding value to our life then why are we hooked to it? What should we do? Does it make us feel connected?

Now that we have established social media is toxic – what should you do? I would love to tell you to be off of it for a bit but I know better. And is it all bad? Can it be made better?

Some tips to maintain well-being while using social media –

• Screen time limit – Set a reasonable limit for yourself, realistic goals fuel motivation and once you attain them: raise the bar higher. Screen time apps are a great way to monitor and control your usage.
• Red tape some hours which should be for yourself, family or work strictly. Prior to 10 am in the morning and post 10 pm at night for instance.
• Turn off notifications for social media off.
•  Meme exchanging with a whole bunch of people, forwarding forwarded jokes on whatsapp could be replaced with the good old fashioned phone calls with a close few.
• While you have all this extra time at hand clean out your social media – remove negative people, block that toxic ex and that person whose stories make you feel bad about yourself.
• Follow that kid you don’t know with a great sense of humour, follow that chef who posts daily recipes, and don’t forget to follow that page with cute pictures of pets while you are at it.
• Post what you like; say what you want to regardless of everything. If you like the way cloud looks – post that, if you want to talk about a cartoon that made you laugh- do that. It would be cathartic to do so.
• Don’t bother with numbers – the numbers don’t matter. 3 heartfelt likes are better than 300 random taps, remember how an egg’s picture got million plus likes? It’s all very random and sometimes stupid. Number of followers matter if you want to become a politician even then not the instagram followers.

Also share my article so I can make total strangers envious of how cool and productive I am during the quarantine even if when they are reading it, I’ll be taking my 2nd nap for the day.