When you’re out with your friends, and something funny happens, what do you do? You laugh for a second, and then you start reaching for your phone to record it, right? Or when you’re at a birthday dinner and everyone is singing happy birthday, do you notice that everyone is focused on recording the experience instead of ACTUALLY singing and paying attention to the birthday girl?
Some parties just consist of people passionately singing their favorite songs for their Snapchat stories and dancing for their friends’ videos. Have you ever wondering why 80’s and 90’s parties look so FUN in movies? Because they didn’t have phones back then. Everyone was just focused on having a good time!
Nowadays, our society is obsessed with doing things just to show others online! (Do it for the vine!)
In my opinion, social media is starting to become more and more toxic. Yes, I know I’m not a social media expert. I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I’ve never even had majority of the social media apps, honestly. But, this is just my experience on the few that I did have.
Since people only show the best parts of their lives, it gives a false representation of how real life is. Not just among celebrities, either. We already know they live fabulous lives. And that’s good for them… But I’m a struggling college student. My reality is different. Sometimes, though, it’s your real life friends who can actually bother you the most online.
*Oh, she said she didn’t even like her that much. Why are they hanging out without me?* (FOMO is real!)
*She went to her birthday dinner, and they’re not even close, but didn’t come to mine last week… *
*If she’s my friend, why doesn’t she post me or like my pictures?*
For example, I know that I work out almost daily and live a pretty healthy lifestyle. But, seeing social media influencers with these “perfect” bodies are super discouraging to people like me. They don’t show how they REALLY get those bodies. They don’t show the plastic surgery, the supplements, the company sponsorships, or the massive amount of photoshop they add to their pictures. No matter how hard I work at the gym, I will never have a body like them. And guess what? That’s okay!
I hate seeing people measure their worth by likes on social media. If you post a picture and feel like you look AMAZING, but you don’t get the amount of likes you want, it doesn’t mean you’re not beautiful! There’s no reason to be hung up on what other people think…
Taking a social media detox is allowing me to live in the moment and reconnect with myself. What exactly am I getting from mindlessly scrolling through apps all day? Nothing. I’ve been learning to take in my surroundings and just enjoy life. I don’t just scroll my day away.
I find it unhealthy to inhale other people’s opinions all the time. Yes, I know America has freedom of speech. But, the amount of hate online on literally EVERY subject is ridiculous. There’s so many people who look for things to argue about, and think they know everything about everything! If I like a specific artist, I shouldn’t have to defend my opinion online in a debate about who is the GOAT.
How many times do we have to have the GOAT conversation about every musical genre!
It’s exhausting! You can never just watch an award show performance without going online and seeing people rip the performance to shreds…even though the artist probably spent weeks upon weeks preparing for that very moment. On election night, Twitter was driving me crazy. In addition to people across social media expressing their opinions, which is great and I’m always up for healthy debate, people were sharing false statistics and incredibly degrading information about the candidates and voter population.
I know for my future career, as a Journalist, that social media is a huge part of the job, but I just don’t feel connected to it right now.
Without social media, I don’t have anyone to compare myself to and that’s good for me. It gives me some time to myself. With finals and the holidays coming up, I want to be in the right head space. So for right now, bye bye social media.
sorry not sorry…