I’ve been writing about our increasingly online world and social media for years on this blog—since I created Just to Claireify in 2017. Posts I’ve written in the past include:
- My Simple Living Journal So Far (scroll down for the Internet part)
- Simplifying My Online Presence
- Why I Liked Blogs More 5 Years Ago
- Why I Don’t Share Much About My Baby Online (this one is private at the moment)
- Social Media Feels Burdensome
Background
Back when I lived in the Bay Area, we were fresh out of college and I worked weird hours. 6am-2pm, Wednesday through Saturday. So I had a lot of time on my hands without Eric around, and no real friends in the area.
I found myself constantly fighting the urge to get online. Being online made me feel less lonely. I could find a community around pretty much any topic: babies (I had major baby fever at the time), wedding planning, blogging, sustainability—anything that I wanted to chat about, there were people out there who wanted to talk about it too! Or I could lose myself in YouTube videos that reminded me of home (I talked about that here).
Unfortunately, a life online is not a perfect substitute for a life in the real world, and I felt that deeply. Sometimes I found myself Googling things like “how to set boundaries around screen time” or “should I go back to a dumb phone?” Because even though I could log off social media and put down my phone, my mind frequently wandered back to them. It made it harder to focus on real life hobbies, especially reading. So many goals; so little follow-through.
Pros + Cons of Social Media
Since then, I return to those questions on a regular basis. How should I manage it? The effects of social media on my life are nuanced; I’ve met wonderful friends in faraway places, and I love blogging as an outlet even more than I did when I started. As a college kid in 2015, I had no idea what my priorities were or what I wanted for the future. Writing has helped me to begin to answer those questions. I’ve even been paid to write for another website! How cool is that, that it’s helped me hone my craft to that level.
On the flip side, social media is dangerous. It’s dangerous to society because it creates echo chambers for individuals. So it goes without saying, it can be incredibly damaging to individual mental health as well. And if you have a tendency to be a glass half-empty kind of person—which I can be, especially during the pandemic, although I try to stay optimistic—the online environment in which you come to exist is negative, chaotic, and it reinforces cynicism and paranoia in a way that the real world does not.
I say “come to exist” because it’s a process. Social media sites track what we’re interested in, what we respond to emotionally, even through subtle cues like where our eyes fall on the page, and how long they stay there. Then they serve us more of that. Over time we end up surrounded by the type of content that we respond to emotionally, despite our best intentions to stay balanced.
Social media turns from a source of entertainment to a source of stress, yet we’re still addicted.
Down the Crunchy Rabbit Hole
I’ll use an example for myself. I’m a crunchy person and a crunchy parent—before I followed anyone crunchy on social media, my experiences in life made me wary of modern medicine and doctors.
Instagram discovered that I inadvertently expressed interest in crunchy accounts in my “explore” tab. I followed a couple. And then a couple more. And before you know it I was following 10, 20 accounts like this. And I agreed with them on some issues, and not on others. But I’m not one to unfollow people because we disagree on a few topics, if I think there’s something valuable to be gained overall. I’m not a cancel culture aficionado.
Anyways. These accounts, during the pandemic, turned increasingly political. And I don’t consider myself aligned with Democrats or Republicans in this country, by the way—“I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side,” as Treebeard says. I don’t even want to live in this country in the future! The US is a mess.
But you know what I realized recently? All that negativity was getting to me. It made me feel like everything was falling apart. Because I did agree with them on parts of it. But to go on CNN, and see the news—and then Facebook, and see the news—and then on Instagram, and see the news—when it’s in your face all the time, you can’t help but feel like the world is descending into chaos.
And I started to understand, even though I didn’t directly feel like this, how people become radicalized and snap. I see it on both sides of the aisle. And I get it now. If you lack an IRL support system and feel like society is going mad, and that it’s working against you and your values, you might go insane. Especially given how hard mental healthcare is to access in this country.
On the topic of a hot button issue right now… Conservatives, I’m looking at you when you say: “Everyone who gets the vaccine is a sheep! I can’t believe how stupid you have to be to trust Big Pharma! They deserve all the side effects they get.” And Liberals, I’m looking at you when you say: “How unbelievably selfish do you have to be NOT to get vaccinated? These people shouldn’t have healthcare. I hope they die.” I guarantee both of you that you’re blaming the wrong person for your anger. The culprit is social media and the echo chamber it has created for you—it’s taken away your ability to see the other side of the argument.
I unfollowed 35 people today.
Well, I tried, but Instagram cut me off at 15, so I’ll unfollow more tomorrow. But for my mental health, I’m deleting my echo chamber and surrounding myself with friends, family, and creativity online—a smaller circle, but one that fosters growth and community, not fear and hatred.
(This post was inspired by watching The Social Dilemma last week. I’ve been sitting on many of these thoughts for a while and they finally came together into something coherent. Sorry to be wordy, but I feel this stuff was important to talk about.)
(Second postscript–I had a very nice request from a blog reader who asked me to use text-to-speech to get an audio version of my posts. I wasn’t super impressed with the options for that online, I thought the files sounded pretty crappy, so I just read and recorded it myself. Enjoy my voice needing a drink of water and my kids faintly yelling in the background :P)