Hello everyone,
Seeing as I've only made one post with a more social commentary-type feel to it, I thought I'd add another with the focus this time being on social media.
Now, before you retaliate, I'm not here to belittle social media nor its users, just to offer some thoughts on social media's place in society because, whether you agree with it or not, it is indeed here and here to stay...
Social Media & Mental Health Linked
Recently, I heard about a story in the media that is trying to increase awareness of the links that exist between conditions like anxiety and depression and social media usage. Ordinarily, as you know by now since my return from blogging hiatus, I despair with the media because of the bilge of control and manipulation it feeds out to people. However, every now and then, stories like this one come up that make me think that society is beginning to realise that the links between increased social media usage and conditions like anxiety and depression etc are real and absolutely need to be talked about.
Of course, at this point it's easy to come up with a biased opinion of why I think that this is, but it would be a tad hypocritical given my recent two part post on why I, as a Christian, am intent on presenting an unbiased Kingdom of Heaven to the world. So instead I wanted to share my own thoughts having suffered with depression and anxiety for quite a long time now.
I made the decision to leave social media last March as I was fed up with the background noise that posts were creating in my life as there were so many posts screaming out for my time and attention. What I didn't realise was that the more I was filling my time just endlessly scrolling through post after post on my smartphone, the more feed I was giving to thoughts like "why isn't my life like that?" or "man, I'm actually jealous of that".
At this point it's easier to blame one site, like Instagram, over Facebook, or Twitter, but the reality is that the more time you spend on using these sites, the more that you are increasing the risk of this background noise moving into the foreground and become at risk of getting distracted from what really matters in life. I definitely do see the uses of sites like these as you can, if you like, follow your favourite celebrities activities, TV show updates or sports teams, to name a few, whilst at the same time you can have a real-time messenger conversation with a friend who's living on the other side of the world.
Your Mental Health is Important
I'm not here to decry their usage, they are useful and I will never deny that. I just wanted to warn you from my own experiences of the dangers of endless scrolling which can lead to endless comparison with your closest family and friends, along with celebrities and film stars, which can lead you down a road that, for me, became very dark repeatedly the more time that I spent using these sites.
Ours is not a world to be envied, nor is it to be gloated over for we never really know what the future holds in our existence. What we need to be doing, and I cannot stress this enough from personal experience, is to be standing together in a unified state of being for whilst we are all different, it is those differences that often cause the envy, the strife, and the anger at what someone has or does for a living, to arise in our minds heads.
This last year's journey that I have been on dealing with mental health issues has shown me that we are all in this life together. So instead of becoming jealous over what our friends post on social media, let's just celebrate that we stand more successful when unified in purpose. This can only happen the moment that we abandon this need to compare ourselves with one another. The desire for comparison will never sate itself until we are burnt out and destroyed by it, but even then it will always try to present itself the moment we find someone or something different to us.
Final Thought
In closing then, given that this is something I might come back to at a later date, I want to urge you all, politely, to stand together in spite of your differences because it is those differences that make us what we are in this life. There is only one go around this merry-go-round called life so why not make it a good one and drop all pretence and comparison?
The only way that we can truly stand unified, I believe, is to stop feeding that desire within us to compare ourselves with other people's lives because that is a desire, which, once fed will only grow and grow and grow leading to more and more dysfunction in our society.
Abandon comparison, embrace our differences and watch us embrace the future with a flourish!
===TLP===
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