The Outside

When I was younger, I used to play The Sims to escape reality.  I would create my characters, build them houses, get them married and have kids.  To what should be nobody's surprise, after a couple of days, months, years in Sim time, I would get tired of the family and move on to a new one.  The fun part was the creation, the newness, the God like powers afforded to you in the interactive simulation game.  I spent many of my weekends engaged in this universe, safe and removed from reality.

 

During this time, the PC was conduit for me to escape.  Later came MySpace, Discussion Forums.  I think most of us had our favorites.  I used to watch American Idol religiously, and I would participate in Idolforums (I think they had 18,000 users).  We had our own culture and way of conversing.  I even taught myself how to make "blendies" and "avatars" in Adobe Photoshop (is that what they still call them?).  At the time, these discussion forums felt more personal.  They weren't completely removed from reality, but I still had an alias.  At the time, I had a screenname that was mostly anonymous and my pen name was Jake.  I did meet a couple of these people in real life, by the way.  I have a few pictures with Diana DeGarmo and Kellie Pickler, for example, stashed away somewhere. MySpace was interesting.  Yes, you had your top friends.  The creative process of designing your page was much more fun than anything.  I have to thank MySpace for locating me my first boyfriend (that's another story).

 

Then came the onslaught of the social media giants.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, all transformed how we interact with eachother.  Unlike the playful, creative and expressive Myspace, Facebook was formal, real and defined.  It was a new way to interact with your friends.  Twitter limited characters to a barren 140 characters.  Seems harmless, right?  I remember when Facebook was harmless.  We shared photos and memories with our close friends, we added new friends as we made them.  There wasn't much editorializing of content, just sharing.  Those days are long history.

 

Facebook has become a platform for regurgitation of programmed media, a source of advertising revenue and shameless self-promotion.  I can barely stand to scroll through my feed anymore, as I am presented with few original thoughts.  It used to be that unfollowing was enough, but in these pandemic days, it's become too much to handle.  The outside never felt more distant.  It never felt more like the wilderness.

 

How is social comparison, not social collaboration, hurting our psyche?  Will this new generation, blinded by an endless aspiration to achieve "more likes", "more follows", incessantly compete for attention as their true feelings towards themselves continue to diminish?  The high rush of a new like, a new follow, a new notification is addictive.  These platforms have known that for a long time.  Maybe they didn't anticipate the deleterious effects of unleashing these features on developing brains.  Research is already beginning to show these effects.

 

"The researchers tracked the participants’ social media time automatically via iPhone battery usage screen shots, and participants completed surveys about their mood and well-being. After three weeks, the participants who limited social media said that they felt less depressed and lonely than people who had no social media limits."

 

From <https://now.northropgrumman.com/this-is-your-brain-on-instagram-effects-of-social-media-on-the-brain/>

 

I don't need a platform to feel like an outsider.  I've always felt as such, from the time I was a young boy, who didn't like to do the same things as the other kids on the playground.  Throughout the years, I've used different ways of coping with my anxiety. Social media takes the cake for the least productive.  Likes, Follows, Retweets, Influencers, Views… these are the snack foods of validation.  They are like the drugs that leave you wanting more and more.  These are the seeds of social comparison that leads nowhere good, transforming any original thought into a response metric.  What is sad is that so many of us feel that we need these snack foods (I do!), to prove our worth.  It can seem daunting to give up.  Instead we should be living our unquantifiable lives in the real world.  

 

After struggling with the use of social media for over ten years, I've finally concluded that I can't use it any longer.  A platform once designed to bring people together in a virtual world, has declined into a platform that, in my view, makes many feel more lonely than ever.  It's time to go back to the old Facebook.  I'm deleting unknowns.  I'm removing outside influences (yes, that includes you, six pack abs). 

 

Life exists in the real world, it's time I let myself live in it.