I started using social media when I was pretty young. Probably too young. It took me a while to understand that social media, and internet in general, are not only a passive form of entertainment. I can use them to learn more about my hobbies, and even about what I study. I can meet new people and talk with them about my interests. I can post some beautiful pictures, instead of keeping them hidden in my camera or my phone.
During high school we would constantly get reminded of how social media, and phone usage in general, was so bad for us. A teacher once said “you will be the dumbest generation to ever exist, because you only look at your phones 24/7”. I hated that. I knew that using the internet or social medias does not necessarily make you “dumb”. After the whole COVID situation, it was not something we would hear a lot anymore.
However, throughout the years I realized that the digital world can make you feel extremely overwhelmed. Sometimes it feels like running around in the busiest city ever. And the noisiest too. You cannot help but listen to and watch everything around you, even when you do not want to, even if it is not what you were looking for. Maybe you go online because you need something in particular, but as soon as you enter that world, there are so many stimula that you get distracted, completely forget what you were there for in the first place, and start exploring with no particular purpose. And afterwards, you realize you wasted one hour. You feel phisically drained, like you have no energy left, but you still want redemption. You still want to do something productive. So you start making plans like “from tomorrow, no Instagram”. But obviously the same thing happens the next day. This is my experience, do you relate?
It does take a while to learn how to balance things. We need to understand what are we looking for on the internet exactly, and focus on that, to avoid any distractions, and to go back to the non digital world as soon as possible. Not because the internet is an awful place to be, but because there are important stuff in our non digital life too. And we do not want to waste energies on non important stimula, do we?
I find it funny that there are digital tools to help you get out of the digital world when you spend too much time online (a timer that blocks a certain app after a certain amount of time, for example). Yet, they can be very useful. I use them too. But we can’t depend on those like we depend on social media. Everyone of us needs to create their own discipline in order to balance the usage of the internet for entertainment and for actually useful things. And then balance how much we use the internet in general with the important things we need to do in our life. This way, probably, both the digital world and the non digital world might be a bit more peaceful.
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