Loneliness.
A concept many have encountered and one that many have come to fear. Getting momentarily left behind at the grocery store, the mall, or on a field trip. A dear friend moving schools, states, or countries, or even worse: you doing the same. Packing up every friendship you’ve made and leaving it behind. The feeling that you may never see your loved ones ever again. Maybe they forgot about you. Maybe they have been trying to get rid of you all this time and they finally found their way out.
Irrational or not, these are some of the fears that are born in childhood and ones that may even linger into adult life. With the introduction of Facebook in the early 2000s, one would think these fears would fizzle out, having a way to virtually stay in contact with distant acquaintances, but perhaps the social media platform, along with all others, causes even MORE loneliness. Sure, you can effortlessly connect with so many people from all sorts of walks of life, but can we call those real connections? Can they hold their own compared to face to face interactions, or are they nothing but a superficial attempt at “connection?”
Facebook allows you to share your life with the world, but it’s not really your life, its a glorified highlight reel. It shows all of the ups and none of the downs, it’s basically a sales pitch of the ideal version of yourself. When you see a long lost friend’s post of their vacation, you aren’t really connecting with them, you connect with the perfect version of them who looks great at every angle or eats at an expensive restaurant every night. You don’t get to see the friend who stepped in bird poop or the friend who wiped out on their first surfing attempt. There is a large barrier, a filter between the real friend and the friend they want you to see that stops any social media interaction from being real.
Youtuber Seriously Odd seems to agree with a few of my points. Here is a short video of their take on the situation.
Seeing these flawless caricatures of people every day can make you compare them to the mundane or negative aspects of your own life and will reflect on your mood and self image. Seeing friends at events you weren’t invited to may cause you to feel left out. And each minute spent on social media takes away from real world interactions you could be having.
To this day, it seems nothing has changed. More and more social media platforms are released to us every year with even easier means of displaying our idealized selves to the world. Think Instagram and TikTok that display a giant button front and center in your face at all times allowing you to sell yourself to the world. They have thousands of psychological engineers working against your one self in order to keep you roped into the app indefinitely through catered algorithms and endless scroll features. If anything, social media has evolved for the worse, all to maximize how much of your time it devours and how much of a profit it can make off of you.
Facebook isn’t just making you lonely, it is curating a personalized experience to actively profit off of your loneliness. Their goal is to get you addicted to being depressed and maybe steal and leak your personal information every now and then just for giggles.
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