Social media detox is required now

Some social media includes Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, TikTok and, yes, I think that YouTube can also be classed as a social media platform. People use it to contact creators and creators use it to share their knowledge and opinions, and connect with their subscribers. But I wonder if people haven’t made their life too reliant on social media.

I was reading a thread on a Facebook group recently where a young girl posted that she’d met someone but was suspicious of him because he wasn’t on Instagram or Facebook or any other social media platform. This is the level at which people are being judged as to their reliability and trustworthiness. People are not like companies that must have social media accounts in order to be able to advertise themselves. When you look up a company or a hospital, of course you want to research them and if they don’t have a website or an official email address you might rightly consider it weird.

Not everybody does social media. In fact, I can tell you that, of all the classmates and colleagues I had during the period 1992 to 1995, none except perhaps 4 or 5 are on Facebook or LinkedIn or any other platform. Back in 1992 I worked with people who were at least 15 years older than me so it’s understandable that they retired years ago and never got the social media bug. However, I am a little bit surprised at the younger ones or those my age. I am dismayed to say that I have had no luck finding many friends my own age. I’ve searched, on and off, for years, to no avail.

Maybe they’re happy not being on social media. After all, social media does give you a false reality of people’s lives since everything can be filtered or edited. I find something very bizarre when I’m walking past coffee shops. One time I saw four people sitting at a table in a coffee shop but not one was talking to each other. Each was immersed in their phones. I ask you, why even bother to meet up? If they wanted to talk, they should have just sent each other messages on social media. It’s laughable. You see someone after so long but you spend the whole time going through your phone!

About 15 years ago, when there was no such thing as Telegram and WhatsApp people would send each other text messages but teenagers took it to absurd levels. Their parents got them ‘minutes’ or data packages and they would be sending text messages even to friends who were literally sitting in the same room as them.

I suppose that lack of physical socialisation began to die when smartphones were invented. Parents should have put a stop to that ridiculous behaviour when they first spotted it instead of encouraging it by not saying anything. Back then not all people of an older generation than teens were into messaging services. They’d prefer to pick up the phone to talk to someone.

But when their teens showed them the stupid ‘fun’ they could have, parents were, to say the least, amazed and wanted to try it. I think that’s when the use of social media got out of hand and when family structures began to deteriorate.

That’s why it’s important to occasionally detox from your social media. Turn your phone off or put it away. Or only answer actual phone calls, and I don’t mean from telemarketers. Sometimes you just need to chill out with friends and family for real. Or watch a movie or play a board game.

Meet your friends, reconnect with people you’ve not seen or spoken to in years, have a coffee with them and just chit chat about your life. Social media can stress you out. You see posts that annoy you or DMs from scammers. When I first began uploading videos to YouTube, in the beginning I’d be obsessively refreshing my profile to monitor the view count. Sometimes it was disappointing. I now upload and then forget about it until the next day to see its performance so that I can tweak titles and thumbnails if necessary.