Can I be honest for a second? I’m sort of frustrated. I’m frustrated with social media, I’m frustrated with my generation, and I’m frustrated with myself.
Why so bothered, you ask?
Because Facebook.
We are all so wrapped up in it that we have forgotten what it looks like to value real relationships with our friends.
To be quite blunt, we have an addiction. Think you don’t? I challenge you to go an entire week without looking at your Facebook feed. Maybe you can do it. Maybe you can push through. But maybe it will be hard. Maybe you will reach for you phone twenty times and realize just as you open your app that you need to close it.
Or maybe you think it’s ridiculous to even go without it. It’s just part of our culture. At least, that’s what they say. “It’s how we communicate. It’s how we stay in touch with our friends.”
But why? When the mass majority of people are surfing the internet with their phones, it makes zero sense to me. Couldn’t we “communicate” and “stay in touch” by picking up the phone and calling our friends and sending them a text? Wouldn’t that be so much more real and personal anyways?
But no. We stick to Facebook and shallow comments on random posts, all while telling our friends we are just too busy to call them.
But we have time for Facebook?
Seriously, we have a problem and we need help.
I’m not saying we need to quit Facebook altogether, although a healthy little challenge could be good for most of us.
But I am saying that we need to get our priorities straight. We need to stop checking out of one another’s lives and stop justifying it by being too busy. If we have time to scroll Facebook commenting on the posts of random friends from ten years ago then we should have time to invest in those closest to us.
I know I’m not the only one. I can’t be. I can’t be the only one that longs to be in touch with those I love, but resorts to the aimless scrolling only to see that those who are “too busy” are fully engaged with the Facebook world. I can’t be the only one that feels like my friends have a new best friend- Facebook.
You know how I know I can’t be the only one? Because I have also been the one who made Facebook my new best friend and didn’t have time for my real friends. I know for a fact I have made other people feel the same way I have felt.
I am genuinely heartbroken over this. And maybe you think it’s dumb. Maybe you think I am overreacting. That’s fine, but just think about it.
We’ve replaced real authentic relationship with a virtual world that doesn’t satisfy. We are addicted to showing our best self- something that is impossible to maintain one hundred percent of the time in real authentic relationship.
We are addicted to our best friend, Facebook.
So what’s the solution to the addiction? How do you step away from something that is so easily justified in our culture? How do you walk the fine line of not having an addiction, but also accepting that Facebook is not only accepted as the main source for communication, but also for business and promotion?
Honestly, I don’t know how it stops but I know it takes one conscious decision at a time.
I challenge you to take that step. The next time you think about scrolling aimlessly, stop. Stop yourself and send a text message to a friend that might be lonely. Call someone that you miss. Send an email to a friend that could use some encouragement.
Because that friend might need you. And relationship that is real and authentic will always satisfy more than the empty aimless scrolling and Facebook deep relationships.
