I never had any social media in my life prior to joining Odyssey. No matter how much my friends at school or parties would try to encourage me to download Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter, I never did. But, I did judge every person who had social media, which hurt me more than them.
I've always had a negative view of social media. I had no idea of its purpose and only saw that people were always on it and appeared addicted to it. It became one of my values to hate this phenomenon to the bone, and I also instantly judged all of the people who used social media. But after I actually made an Instagram and Twitter account myself, I realized that I didn't really have the right to blame anyone for being addicted to their phones. I was, and I am just as vulnerable to my phone as everyone else.
You can really only build resistance to something by being exposed to it.
But it couldn't happen to me, right? I couldn't get addicted. People always believe they won't get in a car crash or develop a life-threatening disease. Everyone believes that "it" won't happen to them because they are different and somehow special. That's why when "it" does happen... it catches everyone by surprise. It definitely caught me by surprise.
You don't realize how far you've gone into social media until it's too late.
SEE ALSO: For Heaven's Sake People, Put Down Your Phone
It all started when I got my Instagram account. It was like another world — one where everyone can share whatever's going on in their lives with other people without actually talking to them. You just have more friends on social media. When I realized this, I went ahead and followed anyone I knew, and soon, I was scrolling through everyone's feeds and was amazed by what they were doing. The simple truth is that you post and share things on social media that you just don't talk about in real life.
Think of it like this: you share a picture, and everyone who follows you instantly sees that picture in their feed. They talk to you in the comments section. But in real life, you don't even glance at each other. You aren't friends. Technology offers you a medium in which you don't think of the person you are talking to as a person. You treat them as if they are part of your device.
This meant that I could interact with people who barely knew me, who didn't even talk to me in real life. I could follow anyone I wanted in the world. It was the best thing ever.
But it was also the worst thing ever.
Suddenly, I found myself staying up late, scrolling through my feed on all of my accounts, and I would wake up tired and disoriented in the mornings. At school, my focus was off. I lost the will to do anything because I thought, why should I? Why should I even try? I became careless and reckless.
And then, at the end of the first week, as if I was waking up from a long dream, I realized I had made a huge mistake. The mistake wasn't actually staying up late and scrolling through my feed; it was underestimating and silently mocking everyone I knew who was on social media and thinking that "it" couldn't happen to me.
Before all of this, I thought I was somehow superior to everyone because I wasn't caught up in other people's lives. I believed that anyone who used social media was incompetent. I let myself believe all these things.
I'm sorry.
The truth is that we cannot judge something or think about something in a certain way unless we've experienced it firsthand. Luckily, I caught myself before I ventured too far into this new alien world, so unknown to people like me.
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I will get still on Instagram because I have it. There's no denying that it's cool, and it has connected our world more than ever. But I also still stand by my belief that social media is not necessarily a good thing. The one major difference in my opinion is that owning social media is not the real mistake. Getting carried away so much that you miss out on the real world is the real mistake. Don't make it.
