21st Century Addictions

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp.

->Why I think it is bad?

The twenty-first-century equivalents of cigarettes, booze, and drugs. We don’t realize or understand how it is affecting us but we still continue to use it because of the hype.

My experience so has been bad. I have used Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. I never really understood why Twitter became so popular! I find these social networking sites compulsive. The kind of performance we put up is often positive. We never say -I’m struggling’, ‘I’m lost!’- but that’s how we often feel. We have become very good at putting on filters to things. The reason why teenagers form the largest chunk of social network users is that their lives tend to be messy and confusing especially at this point of time. We feel like nothing is going our way or maybe we feel like our parents are doing this or that or maybe our grades are slipping. The transition from adolescence is marked by some important decisions. The thing is that most of the teenagers today(including me) think that there are going to be some defining moments in our lives where we make those huge decisions and come out victorious. But no. The choices we need to make boil down to simple everyday choices. It’s not easy, sitting there lost, deliberating, clueless. To escape this tough situation, teenagers tend to turn to social media where we post a photo showing us riding a cool bike or maybe a cute pic with girlfriend or boyfriend, get likes and comments from our so called ‘friends’. The reason we tend to keep checking the no.of likes and comments we get gives us a dopamine high which is the hormone released when people consume booze or drugs. This behavior is contagious. It’s like this endless loop of misery, where seeing one boy’s social network feed a boy feels jealous as it seems he is having a perfect life and tries to indulge in it himself.

I have seen many people in my teeny-tiny time so far who have turned to social-media in their difficult times. It breaks my heart to see how badly social media affects them. They faced some tough times and they chose to pacify themselves with social-media.

Social-media messes my mind real bad. I tend to spend too much time in the news feed and I also noticed that I tend to have wrong perceptions on how I have to live or do things.

Trust me, it’s all fake.

I’ve never been able to make piece with these apps. I find it too distracting. And somehow I’ve become repulsive to the mindless scrolling. Even when I download the apps, I tend to overuse them, get sick and delete in a few days. I couldn’t believe how attached I had become to them especially Instagram and Snapchat and it took me almost 2 days to convince myself to delete the apps. All the time I had this inexplicable feeling of losing something valuable!! And I hate the facebook app the most. So I am using fb only from my laptop. I am glad that I have been a bit successful in curbing my temptation to open facebook. Being in the know of what people were up to somehow always made me feel like I’m losing out on something. So I’ve decided it is for the best if I stay ignorant and work instead.

->Where are we now?

We cannot live without WhatsApp and Facebook today. Granted. But to me, these were good mediums of communication until the trolls and memes took over. Now, whenever I open my news feed 90% of it is some trash. Now when I open FB, It would serve my purpose if I could see the real posts people post and some memes that they share. And as I result of this I end up scrolling most of the time and very rarely keep up with my friends. I find this mindless scrolling to be mentally draining. But hey, it has become the easiest way to keep up with things around the world, so, my bad, I just have to put up with it.

But these sites are becoming exhaustive. The worst thing is that they are programmed in such a way that the more people use it the better it gets. It’s like a web that keeps spinning around us and keeps getting thicker and thicker.

So it all depends on how judiciously we use it!

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