My inner chatter and inner dispute

I often stop myself from sharing photos and posts on my social media because I do question the point of putting photos of myself out there to the 300 people I follow online. It's a great way to connect with others and helps us to stay up to date with our lives in this hectic day and age. We can be passive observers of people we met at some point in our lives but again, what's the point? Why can we just not send the picture to our friend on chat? Is that not more meaningful? What's more important, to have a semi-close relationship with 300 people or three deep meaningful friendships? 

You probably need both types of relationships in your lives. Especially nowadays, due to the increased interdependence on each other. As much as we would love to believe that we live independent autonomous lives, we don't. Due to our fragmented and globalised society, we now rely on strangers to provide us with work opportunities, food, commute, and entertainment. Fostering and developing at first shallow relationships can be handy at some point. We can no longer rely on our community for basic needs; food, shelter, and connection. In such a fast-paced environment and globalised economy, we're homogenising our culture and losing our identities and sense of belonging. There are benefits too but I'm focusing here on the negatives that ultimately hinter the human connection that is incremental to our well-being. This is gonna be a recurring theme in my posts but I cannot stress it enough, we're social animals and need strong social connections for our overall well-being, which would solve a lot of the personal, social and global issues that we are facing today.

In my personal opinion, that's influenced by my own experience and also the collection of ideas from the articles, and books I've read (which was definitely filtered by my personal bias, however, I'm trying to be as critical as possible here), I came to the conclusion that most of the time when people post a picture or a random tweet out there, it's a call for attention and validation.  It's a fact that people are more lonely these days. With every like, heart, comment and new follower, people get a hit of dopamine. It's like taking a shot of espresso to feel more awake rather than actually going consistently to bed on time to get a proper good night's sleep. It's a fast track to the level of a temporary sense of happiness that our primal brains had no chance to adapt to in a sustainable way to cope with it. Social media gives us an illusion of connection with others. It's just a mere illusion, not a reality. How can I feel close to the people that I see as a grid composition of pictures, a nickname that often does not even resemble their real names and a profile picture that sometimes does not even show their face? 

I get that social media is a strong engine where people share meaningful ideas, increase their impact and create a sense of belonging if you struggle to find that in your physical environment however, oftentimes posting snippets of your life signals more the lack of connection we have in our everyday, real life that we are not getting because we live in such an isolated society. 

And on top of everything, we're exposing our private information out there that can be traced back easily through a few Google searches, that can easily be used against us since people have the tendency to take information out of context and forget that one can actually change in the span of a few years. People's identity is not static, we change daily but I guess most are too busy thinking critically and challenging their own limits. And I do not blame them, we are daily bombarded by information that we cannot possibly digest and not everyone has the tools and the capacity to filter through the information funnel. This is part of a separate conversation but also important to superficially mention in this context.

So will I stop sharing pictures of myself and occasional stories? No, but I'm trying to be more mindful of the intention of why I am posting something. I think most of us should strive to add value to others' lives in whatever form resonates with us the best. Ultimately, I guess in my idea of an idealist world, I'd wish:

1. people would have more meaningful relationships offline 

2. social media was used for good causes

3. social media feed is not just an oversaturation and re-iteration of meaningless trends that really add objectively any value to people's lives

And lastly, if anyone's reading this, I hope you'll challenge the way, you use social media and will make you reflect on the current relationships you have in life.

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