Social media is teaching your kids apathy & leaving you & your relationships feeling vacant.
I talked to someone the other day and asked her get to know you questions such as “what do you like to do in your free time” “what music do you listen to” “what do you like to eat” and she jokingly said back “I don’t think I have a personality I don’t know what I like, I just scroll on my feed”. To that I said “Okay whats your feed?” and she couldn’t give a good answer to answer again, I don’t know.
Since having kids it’s been so evident that they are what they are exposed to. They repeat what is shown. Children are but parrots. They are humans with their own set of emotions, but how you treat their emotions is what they replicate. They aborb what you do and replicate. It’s a beautiful reflection of showing you exactly what your emotional immaturity lies. They will lean into weak points because they’re designed to find where boundaries lie, so something emotional you need to work on … will be routinely practiced with relentless force. The paradigm of childrens worlds is absorption of ours, good bad and ugly.
After doing social media for the past three years more seriously, you become entirely a slave to the algorithm. Your analytics are dependant of your engagment with other accounts. And people’s engagement to yours is hyperdependant on your ability to hook them in and how quickly you can engage with those who engage with you. What this does is make the app more addictive, which fulfills the intent of the design. Netflix co-founder said their biggest competitor wasn’t another business, it was sleep. People have become so engrossed with numbing themselves and letting their bodies rot because it feels good to not have to think. You can plug into a reality where you can get dopamine like a rat wired to a button. Where before the creation of these apps, you had to work for it.
The unfortunate part of this is my children watch me all consumed with filming, editing, consuming of everyone else’s thoughts, everyone elses strict routines, their creative recipes, AI slop, their clean homes. While I sit and do nothing. It’s disgusting and embarrassing. How pathetic of me to allow my children to watch me all absorbed with climbing the invisible ladder of social media fame. In hopes for income off the app that feeds off others insecurities. I’ve had enough.
Again, social media is reliant on hooks and peak in human interest. We look at studies like Anthropology where it studies human behavior and evolution through time, we’re wired to take interest in face paced movement, drama, heightened emotions, the unexpected. From an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors benefited from paying attention to individuals with greater resources, influence, or social standing because those people often held access to food, protection, knowledge, or opportunities. As a result, the human brain developed reward systems that are highly sensitive to status, social comparison, and scarcity, social media platforms such as instagram, tik tok, facebook, have used this to their advantage. The brain's natural drive to seek novelty, compare ourselves to others, and pursue greater resources keeps us engaged and constantly wanting more because we are getting the small hits of dopamine without putting any work in, the balance is skewed. Making you biologically hungry for more, less effort and still retain some reward = perpetually seeking mild fulfillment.
Reels are consumed so quickly, the part of the brain that stores long term memories often doesn't have enough time to process what we're seeing, leaving us entertained in the moment but unable to remember much afterward. So when you watch six hours of reels a day and stay stimulated and emotionally heighted off short reels designed to keep you engaged via emotions, when your life has emotion stir in you’ve become numb and unequipt with how to respond. Many become overstimulated quickly because you’re not used to heightened emotions in an intense way, only in a superficial and perfectly calculated to make you feel good about your interests kind of way.
Back to our kids, they watch us stare at a 5 inch screen and numb out while we tell them they can’t be on it or worse we give them their own and think nothing of it because it makes them quiet for a bit. Allowing us to consume everyones best angles with the 8 seconds of the best part of a song overtop a filter that compliments their features and hides impurities. I think in every way social media is equivalent to porn, but because there aren’t naked bodies on the screen people don’t negate it with the same passion they do in porn. Both demons are being fed, it’s just a different pallet. Giving it’s consumers access to false reality, and entire feed designed to show only lives most intriguing and captivating content. Did you know 7/10 individuals live paycheck to paycheck and the average home in the U.S. has $105,444 of bad debt. But, go ahead and see that amazon haul and buy what they say will make your life easier so you can buy the same cheaply made tools, upgrade the car because something shinier came across your feed. Buy more, feel less, foster less connection and have less pride to what already have. Our children watch us make these choices, and they will replicate the good the bad and the ugly.
If you like skittles so I fed you skittles 4x a day for the rest of your life, how much would you like skittles? I know you like them, and you savor and excite yourself over them, so more would make you more happy right? Or would that numb you out towards the pleasures in your life. Chronically hitting that button we are designed with, makes you apathetic. Takes away from the joys and small wins of your own life. To spend HOURS a day consuming a feed that demands heightened emotion for engagment, is teaching you how to not feel in your own life. There is ying and there is yang. You cannot know true pleasure if there is not suffrage in process. Thinking you can shortcut and hack your way there leads to unsustainable change, creating addiction.
When you spend so much time on the phone consuming others lives, you have nothing to account for in your own. It leaves you feeling vacant in your own body, a shell of an individual. What do you like, what experiences do you have that curated your beliefs? When all we do is consume others, we cannot properly connect to the relationships in our lives because that connection is reliant on vulnerability, personal stories, and a strong sense of self that which can only be achieved through experiencing life through your own hands.
I have made the recent decision to have my iphone like an ipod. I am purchasing a “dumb” phone today at AT&T, it will have maps, texting, calling, calculator, all the little comforts but no social media apps. I will be using my cannon camera from now on instead of my phone, I will print books of photos instead of leaving them in my camera roll to be forgotten about. I’m buying a landline for my children. It’s called TIN CAN, you can only receive and call those on approved lists so no more spam calls. They can call and curate community, talk to cousins, grandparents, call us! We’ve deleted our subscriptions to mass media outlets because having HBO max, netflix, disney, youtube TV, Hulu … was more than $200 a MONTH! GROSS! We’ve bought our children dvd players, and we still will have disney+ until I feel I have all the movies on DVD I can find from goodwill, PBS kids is free, and if we want really badly to watch a certain show or movie we can pay the $20 for it.
The biggest difference I hope to make with this transition is to live my life and to curate excitment in the mundane. I want to feel true joy again. I miss the highs and lows of life. I want to go back to the movie theaters! No more movies in home, let’s all go out together and see one! Sneak snacks in and giggle that we made it through. OR! Lets movie night at home! Walmart run for our favorite snacks and we can indludge the $20 on the movie so we can all snuggle up and savor the experience. I don’t want to be numbed out by the chronic screens, I want it to be special again. I want to feel in my life. I want my children to mirror my good choices. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I don’t envy the lives of those heavily indulged in tech so why should I follow?
The beauty in life is that we all have a choice in everything we desire. The only person white knuckling the invisible rules is you.
I hope through this transition, it will help foster environment that curates empathetic children who love their lives and savor earned experiences, children who understand anything valuable worth having will require work and suffrage and that is the exchange. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But I cannot live with myself knowing the consequences of these choices and then continuing to contribute to my own destruction.
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them” - James Baldwin
