Social Media Hiatus

The time has come to say goodbye to social media...for now

This year has been really crap...yeah I know that sounds obvious. For me especially so. I have lost a close family member (not to COVID-19 thankfully), my husband has also lost a family member and I have suffered two miscarriages while almost all my friends have been giving birth all over the shop. Is it any wonder that my mental health has been particularly bad of late (although as I write this I am still in the process of miscarrying for the second time).

How Social Media has contributed to the problems this year

Because everyone has been stuck at home there has been more reliance on technology than ever before and that includes social media. Anything to try and stay connected to other people. We are a social species after all.

There was a troubling trend in social media before the pandemic though and it has changed dramatically since I was first using social media about 15 years ago. Back then it was a way of sharing silly cat memes and playing against each other in virtual bowling games. Chuck Norris jokes were the most controversal thing you could send another person. Myspace was the dominant social media site and Bebo was the other way you could stay in contact with other people through dodgy messages. No one was a keyboard warrior though and no one would go out of their way to 'troll' another person. I hadn't heard the term 'troll' before about 5-10 years ago in relation to social media.

It could also be that a lot of people have now grown up. 15 years ago I was in my late teens and a lot has changed in my life since then. I don't remember having to deal with parents or anyone over the age of 25 usually though. The dynamics of social media have changed as time has gone on and older people have adopted the technology of their children and the generation younger than me have only known a time when social media has existed and have never known how to fill their time without the endless scrolling.

Of course the whole business model is for growth of these sites and they allow advertising now in a way that never existed when I first used social media and this can also have an effect on how we use the platforms. 

Because the technology exists to have an app version of the social media sites on our phones we can post in real time. In the past you had to post from a laptop or PC when you logged on and you couldn't just spew your immediate thoughts on to your feed and you had to think about what you were typing.

It isn't just the pandemic as there have been loads of other issues this year that have been partly caused by the pandemic and the rest has been institutionalised racism on a level we have never seen before. As people are able to hide behind fake profiles there has been a lot of hatred and anger online that hasn't always been directed in the right place.

Everytime I log on I see some form of hatred, some form of violence towards some one or some group. It is making things harder to deal with. When I have had my own personal issues to deal with this year (see above) it makes it worse when I am trying to cope with these and I see the rest of the world burning. It stops you wanting to get out of bed, let alone leave the house.

So what's the plan?

I am going to challenge myself to not use social media for the whole month of September 2020. I will use this time to read, take more exercise and try to remember what life was like when I didn't have a phone to endlessly scroll through for hours on end. Yes I will use text services and obviously use it as a phone. I also have a language app on my phone that I will be using to improve my Spanish and French. However, I will not touch social media for a month. 

In doing this I hope to improve my mental health and physical health without the stress of what I see online. This is not a case of ignorance is bliss, but a way to reconnect with myself, slow time down and concentrate on the truly important things.