2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
It took me a little over a week.
During this week, a whole revolution happened in my mind:
- I began to choose the events I wanted to attend based on the emotions and feelings they evoked in me and the people I expected to see in them - rather than the beauty of potential photographs that I could later put on public display;
- I stopped getting upset when visiting a rival's page, the existence of which I knew exclusively from a social network, and learned to form an opinion about a person based on personal communication, and not on his random reposts;
- I stopped comparing myself to the ideal image of a person living a happy life and concentrated on my own development. The only person with whom I now have to and will compare myself is I yesterday, last month. It's me a year ago!
It is interesting that my generation, born in the 90s, absorbed both the delight of the discovery of a new virtual reality - virtuality - and managed to get bogged down in all sorts of frustrations, self-flagellation and negativity. The gap between an active, fantasy childhood, where our imaginations turned lilac leaves into currency, and informational online consumerism, where the rules of the game are served on a platter, turned out to be too obvious.
Born for the sake of good unity, the social network for many of us has become an occasion for comparison and shame, neuroses, depression, the development of sociopathy and the inability to build and maintain healthy relationships. As a terrible consequence of dependence on social networks, many of my peers have amputated understanding of the family unit and their role in friendships. Every day, my loved ones, people dear to me, bathe in a servile desire to comply with a certain generally accepted "standard", basically tied to an ideal appearance and impressions that the real world is objectively unable to provide in any way.
I remember seven years ago (it was 2011: we taught as best we could) I studied English with a tall and handsome man. This man was young, married and successful. He had an amazing sense of humor. He never spun in a chair or took out his phone during class. One day he got a call from his business partners and had to be distracted for ten minutes. After this incident, he ardently apologized and asked me to let him pay for an hour of my work, promising that “this behavior” would not happen again.
Imagine my surprise when he once noticed that he had never registered on the social network! As soon as I got to know him, my imagination drew the number “1000 and more” likes next to each of his photographs. My student has traveled to four continents and was planning a trip to the North Pole. Not a single photo, not a single “motivating” post.
I don’t want to say that leaving social media will help you clean up your life. I can only say with confidence that going out into the real world will increase your susceptibility to events of all kinds: both positive and negative. As for negative emotions, here the positive effect is strikingly noticeable: the absence of contrived stimuli helps to feel peace of mind and finally relax. Are you ready to feel the joy of childhood?
Since a social network is an addiction akin to a drug or alcohol, there is a chance that withdrawal will come. Once it is deliberately overcome - and all the burden of worries sucked out of the finger will fly away into distant space, like the used hulls of a composite rocket.
The good side of social media. How to enjoy networking?
Social networks can and certainly should serve people well. They have become indispensable helpers for individual teachers like me, psychologists and psychotherapists who want to reach out to the client. Famous people do not mind chatting with a technical student, and former classmates have found each other again after being thrown around the world for half a century. The gap between politicians and voters has narrowed, and in a common scenario, each of us again felt that his opinion was significant and interesting.
So how to make your stay on social networks joyful and enjoyable?
I came up with a few rules that helped me to enjoy the informal pastime “on the net”. There are four of them:
- Try to go to social. networks only when you are in a good mood.
-
Think of your page (as well as the pages of others) as a game where you need to choose a character and act on it. Remember that neither your page nor the page of other people is a background in order to form an opinion about its owner in real life.
- While surfing the Internet, at least once every five minutes ask yourself the question: “How does what I watch / do now affect me? It makes me happy? Am I having a good time? " If you feel that your mood has deteriorated compared to the moment before you entered the social network, your brain is giving you a signal to “leave the building immediately!”
- Unsubscribe from people you dislike, but you can't stop “following” them. This surveillance excites a lot of emotions in our minds: from jealousy to aggression, from calming down to gloating. We don't need these "mind games"! It is much better to start building relationships in real life: worthwhile, interesting, prompting for self-development and knowledge of the world.
Finally, let us remember that man is by nature a pioneering explorer. I am not urging readers to leave their husband and cat and go to Hawaii for an orchid bath. Curiosity is a natural feeling that we personally suppress in ourselves, germinating cynicism and excessive, painful rationality in our hearts. Seeing and experiencing an interesting experience is much more spectacular than savoring it before going to bed and once again driving away the film reel in mind according to the planned scenario, all with the same ending.
Take risks, live and be happy! Be brave
Lilia Cardenas, English teacher, psycholinguist, writer
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