Digital Stuff

This separation of people in the last year with quarantining has been jarringly upsetting.

One thing I particularly dislike is the way social media has jumped in to tell us just how much we don’t measure up to others. When we don’t see people in real life, it’s easy to assume so many things about them and about the relationship they have with you and about who they are as a person. A picture or a million pictures does not tell the whole story and sometimes seeing someone’s picture that you don’t really know anymore or hang out with anymore can be kind of painful.

Every individual story is unique and challenging in its own way and by reducing our existences into social media postings, we are feeding into the lie that we need outward acceptance to measure our level of worth, beauty, intelligence or likability. We have to up our intelligence or we’ll get throttled by the judgements of those who know better. We have to preface that we are aware of all of the things that are wrong in our pictures or that we don’t think we look that great or that we are not stupid about some random thing that someone might notice about us.

The reality is that the digital world has become very real and while we may not be living in virtual realities (yet), the more time we spend on our phones, laptops, computers, televisions, play stations, tamagotchis, the more we are separating ourselves from life. Sometimes these things enhance life but they also take away. Speaking from experience in these matters, I do not often feel revitalized by spending time scrolling through social media or binging a show. I want to make digital content and participate in that world, but I don’t want my life to be only digital.

There is life beyond sharing about life. There is life beyond posting the coolest picture that people will view for 2.5 seconds and never think about again. We are saturated with digital content. We are saturating the digital world and it’s getting a bit out of hand. The expectation is that we produce an image of ourselves that is respectable or inspirational or enlightening or fun, when in reality it’s just exhausting to expect yourself to be something you feel like you have to be in order to receive admiration or in order to hold your reputation in tact.

I believe time away from social apps is essential to my health and also that it is not all bad. We are learning as we go because fifty years ago, all of this digital stuff was just getting started.