FaceReality not Facebook

One of the main problems of our time is the obsessive consumption of social media, to the point that it controls our lives. It's enough to look around us to understand how people become so addicted.

People walk down the street, wait in line, ride the bus, sit with their children at the playground–and scroll, scroll, scroll. Another picture, another video, another profile, another recipe, and another hour has gone by, and another, and another… And before you know it, life itself has passed by.

In the excellent documentary film The Social Dilemma, we see with terrifying clarity how big companies manipulate their users by utilizing algorithms that encourage addiction to their platforms. One of the strongest lines in the movie is – "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product." We are the product! We can hardly experience moments of joy anymore without documenting and sharing them online; if we didn't post it to one of the social media platforms, it's as if it didn't happen. We measure our success by the number of likes, views, and followers we have, and that's also how we compare ourselves to others. As a society, we've entered an addictive loop that we can't seem to break free from, and it's wasting our most valuable resource: time!

The moment we give social media such immense weight, it can easily damage our mental health and self-image.

Yes, social media platforms are also wonderful tools to promote our businesses, get recommendations, learn, stay connected, and deepen our knowledge…But maintaining a sense of balance, that is, keeping social media as a tool that serves us rather than an influence that affects our souls and determines our fate–is in our hands. And this depends on whether we set a purpose for our scrolling, or not. it's important to understand that our mind perceives scrolling on social media as chaos, messiness, an overload of details, letters and colors. In comparison, when we spend one-on-one time with a friend, our mind can perceive and process the details with ease. Real, human interactions allow us to process information and emotions, develop empathy, absorb details deeply, and through this enrich and change our world, both inner and outer. It's better to have a few real friends than hundreds of virtual friends. It's better to talk to them face-to-face, to hug them, eat with them, drink with them, cry with them, laugh with them, when we can see them before our eyes, and they aren't hiding behind a keyboard and screen.It's preferable that we focus on our own lives, our goals and aspirations, and not on the perfect pictures of people living "perfect" lives on social media. 

Limiting our activity on social media will reduce its influence on us, allow for more real and meaningful in-person interactions, and keep social media use at a low but effective level (remember? Set a goal for your scrolling!). When we define the rules and guidelines for how we want to live–we have more vitality and power, much more than when we let big corporations dictate the rules for us. If you want to take charge of your life in a way that truly serves you–one of the first steps is to limit your social media consumption. Social media has its place, but in moderation.