At the church I attend, we were challenged to take a break from all social media, worldly music, and news. At first I thought that this notion was really impractical, but then I realized that
1) I don’t have cable TV,
2) I have plenty of worship music that I love listening too, and
3) social media is something that I find really draining sometimes.
So starting that day, I decided to take a break from all of the things that he recommended, and the first order of action was to delete all social media apps off of my phone. Granted this was only Instagram, but still, I knew if it was still on my phone screen I would be tempted. The following days were a lot less challenging than I anticipated. The only time that I ever wanted to check my social media was sometimes when I found myself bored either before class started or while riding the bus to and from school.
Anyways, the not being on social media isn’t the part that surprised me. What surprised me was when I decided to check social media after the week was up and discovered that I actually didn’t miss it at all. Upon my return to Facebook, all I saw were images, posts, and videos majority all about politics. Now, I am someone that believes that having your ideas and values is important, but honestly at this point I cannot stand seeing someone’s Facebook rants. I don’t care about the number of people at Trump’s inauguration, I don’t care that the picture being shared of Trump’s Inauguration is one hour before it started, and I certainly don’t care to hear the terrible name calling of anyone that has a different opinion.
I quickly exited out of Facebook from disappointment and annoyance, and I logged on to Instagram where the other results I found weren’t much more promising. On Instagram, I found pictures of friends sharing their latest and greatest materialistic things, a blurry, red-eyed photo of them at a party, or a picture of them kissing their latest boyfriend.
Does this post make me sound a little bitter? Probably… but anyways that’s not really the point.
My point is that we as a society don’t realize it on a day-to-day basis, but social media can be really detrimental in our lives. It can give us unrealistic expectations to what our lives should look like compared to others, and it can even drastically change our moods after reading something really upsetting. Now, am I saying that we should all just delete all of our social media accounts? No. I am saying, however, that we should all be more mindful while scrolling through our newsfeeds and remind ourselves that the things we see and read aren’t “real” life and they aren’t always facts or truths.