As you all know, I'm a little bit crazy when it comes to social media. It kiiiiinda runs my life and I'm never able to spend very long away from it. Even a little over an hour without a phone and my Twitter and Insta and I start breaking out and getting anxious (not gonna lie). I used to say I was unashamed of this, but truth is I'm quite ashamed.
Social media has taken over all parts of our lives and it's hard to get away from at this point. Everything runs through a computer: our to-do lists, our calendars, our public lives, our private lives even... Our hopes and dreams and life goals are on show for everyone to see and the more I think about this, the more disturbing the idea is to me.
I am at a stage in my life where I have several critical life choices to make. What I want to do with my career. Who I want to allow into my life, as a friend or as a romantic relationship. What kind of quality of life I want to have. What I want to take up in my free time. There's so much riding on this period of my life, and it's incredibly terrifying for an 18 year old girl. Everyone I know is in this same situation as well: we're young and forced to make choices that will affect the rest of our lives. Social media only adds to the stress, as now it's a social norm to let everyone know your daily happenings and when you're midst all the stress of college and the choices you're making, living in the public eye can possibly cause you to make the wrong choices.
For example, if I tweet something about possibly accepting a co-op offer, and several people weigh in, their opinions would most definitely hold influence over my ultimate decision. I may just end up making the wrong decision for what I want. That's the danger of social media.
Two weeks ago, I decided to take an entire week of off Twitter. I had been spending every other minute checking and rechecking my feed and I needed to take some time off to collect myself and refresh. So from Sunday night until Friday night, I did not once open Twitter. I deleted the app from my phone. I blocked the site from my laptop. And for the first 24 hours, I thought I was going to die.
I had gotten to the point where everything revolved around social media. It was like my life was not validated until I posted a pic on Insta or wrote a tweet about it. Happiness was getting over 40 likes on an Insta pic and I realized that it was too much pressure and quite stupid frankly.
So to begin the week, everything was difficult. I kept trying to distract myself but there were times where I simply laid on my bed watching my phone's screen waiting for a text of some sort or ANY notification for that matter. But then, about 4 days in, I started to get less anxious about not tweeting. I started to have fun simply for the sake of having fun, not because I wanted a cute pic to post on Facebook out of it. And it was fanTASTIC.
Don't get me wrong, when the week was up, I was ecstatic to get my Twitter back and be up and running again. But having a refresh was lovely. I now spend much less time on Twitter and it's caused me an incredible amount of satisfaction. I no longer feel the need to read through my entire feed because I might miss something. Life's the littlest bit simpler now and it's beautiful. Here's hoping I don't get too bad again, but it's good to know that if I do I can take a detox week.
Today's post is a bit different than my others, and I will be sure to post another later in the week on another topic, but I felt this needed to be talked about. I'll never call social media "stupid", but I do think the way our culture has become obsessed with it, and admittedly how addicted I am to it, is stupid. We let something that really shouldn't mean all that much mean everything to us and as a person who does this, it needs to stop.
Thanks for listening to my spiel.
Until next time, love y'all, bye!
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