Don’t waste your time mate. I’ve done that. Don’t do it yourself!
Social media is toxic. It will suck up your entire memory juice and leave you like a hippo on a tree.
Social media is powerful. A tweet can spark a global movement. An Instagram post can change your perceptions of beauty.
There are two sides to everything. So does social media.
On one hand, social media like LinkedIn can help you show up your career resume and get a job faster than usual.
On the other hand, a nonsense Facebook post can ruin your entire day.
Why Social Media Is Toxic: The Impact on Mental Health
Most of the time when you get up in the morning, you first pick up your phone and check out social media. What’s the latest news, how much reaction did you get on the post you shared last night or any comments on them?
Most of the time you get heart-pleasing comments from your followers but sometimes it doesn’t go how you expect. And that’s when your day gets ruined.
You get 10 comments on your photo, 9 are good and only 1 are bad. I can bet for a trillion U.S. dollars that the bad one will catch your attention most.
That’s basic human psychology. Your brain has a built-in software installed called “Negative Bias.”
It happened with almost every social media user on this planet. As a result, your life becomes more toxic. Your mental peace starts to vanish from your life like the genie from Aladdin’s magic lamp after three wishes. It has a massive negative effect on your studies, corporate, and social life.
Unrealistic Expectations and Comparisons: The Pressure to Be Perfect Online
Do you ever upload a picture on social media that makes you look bad?
The answer is a Big Nooo!
Then why do you think that people will upload their worst moments on their social platforms? They never do that. People always upload the best picture from their gallery.
This social platform is all about show-off. If you go to the Instagram search section, you’ll probably see some guy flexing on a yacht enjoying the sunbath with some bikini ladies.
Or some guy is just throwing money on the street for no reason as if they have a dollar printing machine in their house.
Trust me, 99% of the time it’s fake. The yacht you see is a rental piece. And the money they throw away is just some printed paper. You can buy some from here if you want to play with your friend.
A billionaire guy never throws his hardworking money on the streets of Dubai. They know the value of it.
Don’t judge your partner after watching some celebrity couples’ romantic vlogs. They are just some actors.
There was a time when some women used to fight with their husbands saying, “Look at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, they bought a love-shaped island as a symbol of their love. You never gave me something unique. You don’t love me.”
That couple were the love icons for the world. And now look at them! The island story was fake, they got divorced and now they are still fighting with each other for their child’s rights.
Addiction and Time-Wasting: The Time Trap
This is where it becomes the worst enemy of your life. Studies showed that 4.76 billion users spend 2 hours 43 minutes per day on average. That means 18 hours a week, 163 hours a month, and 992 hours in a year.
That’s just statistics. The reality is far worse and you know that. The example is you.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that you checked out on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok just for notification but you didn’t realize that you already spent half an hour checking on other things that were not even in your checklist.
You are not the only one facing the issue. This happens to almost everyone. Every social media uses a specific algorithm to hook you up for the longest time possible. And you’re just a user of that algorithm.
Privacy Issues and Data Exploitation: Your Data, Their Profit
Social media is free! Right?
Sorry mate, always remember the quote from Tristan Harris, “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.”
Try this…
Go to Google
Search for some products. (e.g. T-shirt)
Search it two or three times.
Now go back to Facebook and keep scrolling.
In less than 5 minutes you’ll find several t-shirt ads on your feed. You’ve never seen those ads but now you see this. Why?!
The reason is you’ve just shown interest on Google that you are interested in buying a t-shirt and Facebook stole that information via a plugin called “Meta Pixel”. You don’t know that, but you did it. (unintentionally)
The data exploitation issue has gone far worse than you know. Consider the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal. Millions of users had their data harvested without consent for political advertising during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That event shook the world. People raised the most concerning and critical question they can ask, “Who owns our data??!”
I’m not the one who should answer but I can tell you this, the answer is NOT YOU!
Social Media and the Rise of Misinformation: A Crisis at Its Peak
Let’s take an example. Your friend Tony is a good guy. You know that because you have a friendship with him from childhood. Someday you see a random guy on Facebook trying to expose him as a bad guy. You ignore that! That’s just a random guy! Who cares about his opinion?
The next day you see another post from another person! You still ignore that.
The next day you see 10 guys posting against him. This time they present some fake unverified stories as proof to make it more believable in front of the public.
Now you start to doubt him..! But yet, you still have a soft corner so you try to ignore that.
The next morning you scroll on Facebook and see hundreds of people posting these nonsense stories.
This time you become one of them. You start hating that party from your heart.
You are a responsible man yet you did not verify those stories. Not even check those profiles’ authenticity. The only thing that diverted your mindset is “Something is true, otherwise these many people wouldn’t share that.”
This trick was used by Hitler and his Nazi army to spread misinformation in front of the world. There was a saying, “Spread false information so much that people start to believe it’s true.”
Since then, that trick has been used thousands of times, mostly between political parties to spread misleading information against their opposition.
And you’re simply a victim here.
Strategies for Healthy Social Media Use: How to Handle Negative Comments on Social Media
Is social media a completely bad thing for daily life?
No, not really. The role of that software depends entirely on you.
So what strategy should we follow to use social media more productively?
Here are some tips from industry experts that recommends to maintain:
- Don’t check out your phone in the morning. Go to the gym, finish your breakfast, and do something productive. Check your social sites as late as possible and save your day from getting ruined.
- Use a secondary account. One for the family and friends and the other for the public.
- Think twice about what you share. Remember, you are being tracked. Once you upload a photo it remains on a server for the rest of its life. Even if you delete it.
- Don’t follow those accounts/pages/channels that do not help you improve your life. Unfollow unproductive channels.
- Don’t share your private identity and contacts with the public. E.g. passport, ID card.
- Verify the claim before expressing your opinion. Do not misjudge someone without witnessing the proof.
- Do not compare your personal life with paid actors. Enjoy your life in your own way. Everyone has ups and downs in their life. They just show the ups and hide the downs from their social account.
- If you don’t like something, block it immediately. Did someone comment badly on your picture? Block them. Someone did not agree with your opinion and replied with an illogical comment?? Use the block button. Don’t waste your time correcting them. You will never succeed in correcting them.
Conclusion: Rethinking Our Online Engagement
In the 6th or 10th century, people used to show off their physical strength in a pub, duel fighting, etc. They often flexed about how many men they killed, and how many animals they slayed to impress women and show superiority among friends.
Time changed, and we got modernized. The pub turned into Instagram, and the duel-fighting arena changed into a Facebook comment box. Now people don’t flex about how many men they killed. They just open their shirt, take a photo in front of a mirror, and post it on insta captioning #its6packbaby.
So you see, showing off in front of others is part of our human nature. I mean it’s not wrong. If you worked hard for your body or career then you definitely should post it wherever it pleases you.
The problem is people don’t want to know behind the scenes. They just ruin their life compared with others.
Social media is one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century. It made possible the idea of connecting people worldwide.
But using it aggressively definitely destroys our lives. Use social media to make friends, not enemies.
That was all for today. Feel free to comment on your thoughts. Au revoir…
