Social Media Shrines to the Self

Social Media and Well-Being

Let me just say, right off, that I am only on Twitter (X) and YouTube as far as social media goes. I am not on any Telegrams or other channels or platforms. I get on Reddit only when there is a question I have that I want a specific answer to. I canceled my Facebook a few years back and I am not on Instagram. I am more interested in social media for the information and news aspect of it. I do not post about myself or follow friends and family on social media. If I want to follow up with friends and family, I call them or meet up with them in person. Otherwise, I feel like my whole life would be consumed by social media—like I would spend no time doing anything else other than liking and following or posting, and it is all already time-consuming enough just scrolling through X for news that I most likely don’t even really need.

With that preamble, I would say that one of the reasons I am not on Facebook or Instagram is exactly for the reasons described in the readings. For example, there is something about being on Facebook that really just plays on (or played on) my feelings—whatever those were at the moment—whether they were bliss, or envy, or desire, or nostalgia, or whatever the case might be. I always could tell that my feelings were just being driven by this platform, they were being run up or run down by my time on it. I was starting to make actual life decisions based on my engagement with Facebook—and this is when I realized that maybe this is not the best approach to life. I have a set of principles, a set of values that I believe I need to live by, and this use of social media was really getting in the way of that. I felt that I was chasing after something totally incompatible with how I believed I should live. So I got rid of Facebook. And, as Konnikova points out (and I believe she is right), Facebook was making me unhappy because it was focusing my attention on things that really have nothing to do with me being the best version of myself that I can be.

The New York Times article also stood out to me because of the way it frames the problem—as one of technology that is too addictive—and whether teens need to have their phones taken away. The problem as I see it, or as I experienced, is not really a matter of technology being too addictive; it is a problem of filling one’s time with the right things and with real things. For me, I do not see social media as a very useful way to spend time or as a way of spending time that helps me to become the best version of myself. It can be a total drag, because the more time spent on social media, the less time I find I spend on things that I actually need to do just to stay up on basic responsibilities—like cleaning, and cooking, and exercise, and reading, and doing things to improve myself, prayer life, things like that.

Teens I think need some direction in terms of character education and how to live their lives and what’s important. They are thrown headlong into the pit of social media without any principles to live by. They need to develop virtues in life—that is what I have learned about myself, at least. We cannot expect others to really become the best versions of themselves if all they are being taught to do, however, is to get online and tear others down or pump others up to feel better about themselves. There is a lot of egoism and narcissism that goes into all that and it really doesn’t help anyone. It is like taking part in a waking daydream that distracts from the ultimate point of life. What is life really all about? That is a big question that does not get enough consideration, in my opinion. Life is filled with so many distractions that keep us from thinking about that question very deeply. Teens especially need some help considering these questions—but teachers, I have found, are not always qualified or of much help. The social media consumption is really just a symptom of a much larger and deeper problem, which is that people have nihilism at their core—nothing to live for, nothing to believe in that is worth believing in, so they build shrines to themselves on Facebook and Instagram and wonder why they are not fulfilled.