Social Media Overload
Have you ever felt that suffocating grip of social media and thought maybe this is not a good thing?
Too many options.
Many couples today breakup or never get together because of too many options. Anyone today has access to new boyfriends and girlfriends. Social media just allows it. Take Facebook for instance. Not only do you have access to message a huge amount of people that you might be interested in, that list of people can grow exponentially even without ever leaving your front door. You can socialise as if you were at a great party, without ever getting drunk or ever getting dressed up or ever going out! Too many options. You can friend someone new. You can reach out to a past lover. Someone you haven’t seen in years and lost contact, but because of facebook you can send a friend request and be having coffee with that person within a few days..
How hard is it to have a quality, longer relationship when you have so many options? Why not just have casual sex and move on to the next person before you have to do the hard stuff? Even more compelling are the dating sites where you can meet someone totally new and they only get to know you by your internet profile. Clearly in this day and age we do have too many options.
I am a parent and I cannot tell you how often I have missed out on a nugget of joy from my child because I had to respond to a smart phone notification. Some friends of mine have actually closed their Facebook account because its wasting too much of their time. And its getting worse. Email, Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest…etc the list indeed does go on.
Social Media Overload
How do we disconnect?
Well, you could try a digital free day in your week. Lets say Sunday. So on Sunday, you turn off your mobile phone, you don’t open your Laptop or iPad. Get off facebook. You don’t watch television even. Just disconnect from all digital stuff and spend the day with people you love. Or read a book. Or catch up on your drawing or painting. Or do some exercise that you normally avoid. Enjoy just being. Enjoy just living.
4 reasons.
- This will be good for the radiation levels in your body.
- This will be good for keeping in touch with nature and therefore your place in the cosmos.
- This will give you a balance in life.
- This will put you in charge and get you out of reaction mode that makes you a slave to social media..
Productivity is an issue for many people.
- In the U.S., over 12.2 billion collective hours are being spent browsing on social networks every day. This is costing the U.S. economy around $650 billion per year based on each social media user costing a company roughly $4,452 per year, according to data compiled by LearnStuff.com.
- In the same study, it was revealed that distractions are not just affecting adults working at companies. The average college student is spending around 3 hours per day on social networks while spending only 2 hours per day studying.
- A recent Gallup poll suggests that 70% of the workforce is “checked out!” at work by having access to the worlds most efficient time-wasters such as Facebook.
Thats US figures. and one can imagine that the same is happening elsewhere. We need to harness all the benefits of technology and minimise the drawbacks. I mean all these cool things were meant to increase our productivity not bring them to a grinding halt. When I was a kid we were told that in the future we would have so much more free time – leisure time- because technology would free us from mundane tasks or at least speed them up. Clearly its has just created a faster moving world but one where distractions can take the place of directing our own lives.
Take charge of your life. Get off facebook by turning off notifications on your phone and give yourself a Facebook Free Month. In 30 days, return and see if anything has changed.
Further to altering your social media, make a list of the people that really matter to you and concentrate your social life with them. Life is indeed short and you need to not waste it by being at the mercy of social media and the modern world of options. You will feel better when you turn that phone off.
Social Media Overload
Gil Balfas