I’m Breaking Up With Social Media (For Good)

Goodbye to my 588 Facebook “friends.” It’s not that I don’t care about you. I just don’t care what you’re doing every single second of every single day. You went to the gym? Awesome. You made yourself a kale-filled meal? Congrats. You went to the gym? Wait, again? Really, nobody cares.

Is that harsh? Perhaps. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon who doesn’t know how to millennial. But I think it’s important for my peers to step back and ask yourselves: Why am I posting this? What’s the point? Do I want to educate and inform others? Or am I just trying to get a specific person’s attention? Is this an accurate depiction of who I am, or who I want to be? Or am I trying to mirror an image that I think society wants me to portray but this isn’t really me at all? Hmmmm…

I wish for a day when we can all live our authentic lives without worrying about how to frame a moment to get the most “likes.” Maybe when pigs fly. But then, of course, who would be able to resist the urge to post a flying pig on social media? Ugh.

Do you ever stop to think what pilgrims would think of society today? I’m serious. They’d think we were all batshit crazy. We care more about our online images than our lives off screen. Every single person has become an actor on the social media stage. Even babies. Did you know 92 percent of kids in the United States alone have an online identity by the age of 2? Puppies I get, but babies…really?

We live in a constant state of notifications. Here’s a notification for you – life is not slowing down. It’s passing you by while you’re filtering through filters and no amount of followers or likes is going to give you the satisfaction you’re lurking for, err…looking for.

Not to mention social media can be dangerous. If you don’t want to delete your accounts, fine. But there’s absolutely no reason for folks to be on Snapchat, or any other social medium for that matter while driving. A quick five second snap of how fast you’re going could lead to zero seconds left of your life. Not worth it. One woman in Ohio left her son in critical condition after a car accident; she was found to be using Snapchat at the time of impact. Another teen in Washington admitted she was texting, using FaceTime and Snapchat all while driving, causing a rollover accident.

Again, can you imagine what the pilgrims would think?

Here we have all of these great technologies, but we’re abusing them. It’s frightening how disconnected we’ve become by constantly being “connected.”

People, get over yourselves. Stop caring so much about what other people think. Stop taking your phone out during lunches and dinners. Stop sharing every single facet of your life like you’re the next best thing since sliced bread. Take a break from social media and think about what makes you genuinely happy and go find that. Because I can bet that on your deathbed, it won’t be likes or followers or the amount of time you spent waiting to connect to WiFi so you could upload that pic of you looking #fab with #nofilter.

Deleting my Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook was one of the most liberating decisions I’ve ever made. And that makes me sad. It’s sad that life has become so saturated with apps and tools that are supposed to bring people together, but they only make others feel like shit. Folks, people aren’t pixels. They’re people. Love them. Be with them. Start a real conversation in real life. Do it for the pilgrims.