You know those badass dudes who do badass shit and post about it on Instagram?
You should unfollow them.
You should unfollow everybody, in fact: The Rock, Jay Cutler, David Beckham, your mom, weird uncle Frank and his blurry cats.
Seriously. You’d be better off. You know this intuitively, but if you need proof it has been studied rather extensively (here’s a study on social media’s effect on depression & loneliness, here’s on one cyberbullying & sleep, low self-esteem, increased stress. You get the idea.).
Unless you meticulously curate your social media feeds, the majority of what you’re exposing yourself to is garbage. It doesn’t make you smarter, happier, or healthier, nor does it bring you closer to your friends and family, like we all pretend it does.
Social media is great at reuniting middle-aged former high school classmates, a fraction of whom are half as interesting now as they were imagined to be 20 years ago. But other than stalking old girlfriends and mindlessly scrolling through food pics and pet posts and front-seat selfies, social media is a waste.
If you care about your friends, hang out with them.
If you want to really know about The Rock or Jay Cutler or David Beckham, read their books (on Amazon here, here, and here, respectively).
If you care about your mom, call her.
Social media is sold to us as the great connector. It’s not. Look around next time you’re at a “social” gathering. Do a headcount of how many people are socializing versus scrolling their phones. Watch couples at dinner. Teenagers in public. Pretty much everybody is guilty. It’s the ultimate irony, that this medium that is literally defined as “social” has the effect of making us feel lonely.
With the exception of email, which is still long-form, one-on-one communication, social media distances us. We “feel” connected because we can “heart” or like or thumbs-up posts from our friends and family, no matter how far away they live, and yet we are more distant from them than ever. Social media doesn’t bridge that gap because social media isn’t real.
Everything we do is signaling: how we dress, what we drive, how we talk, the hair, the shoes, the house, the hat, even how we look physically is a signal to the world about our priorities, our diet, our level of activity.
What we post to social media is no different. It’s a glimpse into our lives, but it’s not an organic glimpse. With the exception of spontaneous uncle Frank and his sketchy cats, most of what people post is a choreographed, the end result of 15 takes and 20 minutes of adjusting colors and adding filters.
It’s not real. It’s not genuine. And neither is the praise or scorn you get as a result of what you post. Who we are on screen or behind a keyboard is not who we are in real life.
Which is why social media is so unsatisfying. It’s why the more we use it the more anxious and depressed we feel.
Understand social media for what it is: a tool.
If you’re not using social media, it’s using you.
If you’re not using social media to boost your side hustle, you’re getting hustled. If you’re not engaging in a community, a cause, a movement, you’re being manipulated.
If your feed isn’t curated to educate and inspire, if you’re not deliberate in choosing what you consume, you aren’t in control of content that’s influencing your character.
If you’re aimlessly wandering social media with no clear reason for why you’re there, the solution is simple: get off it.
Try it for a day.
Read a book, call your grandma, wash your car, have a beer with your friend. Go do some of your own badass shit, but don’t post it on social media: do it for yourself!
Do something to make you better. That’s the challenge.
