“Share With Friends”: The Other Side Of The Coin

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Have you ever had that after printing another post and supporting it with a photo (or vice versa - depending on the type of the social network), you feel an emptiness in your soul?

Popular wisdom says: shared grief is half grief, shared joy is double joy. The feeling of emptiness is far from joy, whatever one may say. Why does it arise?

Understanding the real reason for creating publications will help to get to the heart of this paradox. Psychotherapeutic practice shows that most of the motives that push us to certain actions are hidden in our subconscious. Our mind is a great manipulator, capable of hiding any “inconvenient” motivations that threaten our perception of ourselves as a good, worthy person. My observations of patients experiencing the inconvenience of addiction to social networks almost always boil down to the same thing: in most cases, the motivation to uncontrollably “share” moments from life online is dictated by a feeling of inner inferiority, fear of loneliness and an attempt to fill your dried up vessel with approval others.

The paradox is that we intuitively feel the manipulativeness of actions both on the part of others and, in this case, on the part of ourselves. Surely each of us has told a lie at least once in our life. Simply put, he lied, knowing full well that he was lying. Remember how the spoken lie responds in the solar plexus, heart or larynx - instantly or after a while; in the very core, no matter how we push it away from our own eyes. The understanding that the truth is always near, no matter how ferociously we rationalize our lies, invariably spoils "all raspberries" for us, hangs a stone around our neck and makes us suffer.

If a lie forces us to publish selected moments of life, a stone cannot be avoided. We can try to get others to believe that things are so and so, but the difficulty and the cause of all suffering is that we cannot make ourselves believe in our lies!

The feeling of emptiness is further enhanced by the fact that people who are addicted to social media have an unhealthy overestimation of the importance of social approval. The joy of wanting to share with friends is mixed with the need to get approval in the form of “hearts”, thereby removing a person from the first-experienced joy of the moment, which was precisely to be in him. In especially difficult cases requiring a psychological study of the root causes and their transcendence, a person subconsciously enters into competitive relationships with other participants in the social network, comparing the popularity of his publication with similar publications, and on the basis of this comparison makes a verdict of the “quality” of the happiness of his moment.

A healthy attitude towards social media is that “you may or may not be digging”. The danger with these Facebooks of ours is not that they exist, but that most of us use them in unhealthy ways.

Working on self-confidence, realizing the usefulness of oneself as a human being / personality and transforming social networks as an object of addiction into a way of healthy pastime without shadow reasons, fueled by the need to assert oneself through social approval, is the key to a healthy human psyche in our century.