We live in such a great era of communication. We have multiple ways of connecting with others. But what if we’re actually becoming more disconnected by connecting with hundreds, even thousands of others?
I’m old.
I remember the days before the World Wide Web. I lived in a trailer, rode a bike to work, and didn’t even have a telephone. In my downtime, I hung out with real people. My friends and I would physically get together and play games, play music, and go out on hikes and other adventures.
For The Love Of Social Media
I was a late bloomer on social media. I didn’t join Facebook until the winter of 2011. It was my only social media for some time. Then I started blogging. Now I have several social media accounts and thousands of friends and followers. Or do I? Really?
It’s true that I’ve been able to communicate more freely with distant friends and family because of social media. It’s true that I’ve been able to connect with dozens of new people that have similar interests.
But what is a connection? Perhaps I’m more disconnected than I’ve ever been. Maybe we all are.
Connections Lead To Being Disconnected
How many people can you truly be connected to? I’m not talking about friends and followers on social media. I’m talking about true emotional connections.
If you do a little research about friendships and emotional connections, you’ll quickly discover something. As human beings we can only handle a handful of true emotionally-based friendships.
You don’t really have 2397 friends on Facebook. You don’t really have 3723 followers on Twitter. It’s just a bunch of emotionally disconnected strangers and a small handful of close friends.
In fact, your time spent on social media is eating into your time with your family and friends that you used to connect with more intimately, more often. That’s right, by connecting with multitudes on a large platform, you slowly become more disconnected to the true human bonding experience.
Scary, huh?
Let’s Flip It Around: Less = More
Remember the old minimalist adage: less = more? Let’s apply it to social media and emotional friendships.
If you long to feel more emotionally connected; if you want to have more close friendships in your life, spend less time on social media. It’s that simple. If you spend an hour less per week on social media, that gives you an hour more to spend with someone in person.
Rather than trying to increase the numbers of your online friends, what it if you tried to increase the hours you spent communicating with people face to face? You’d become less disconnected than you’ve been in years. You’d develop more genuine relationships.
Make a promise to yourself to focus more on true emotional connections instead of numbers on a computer program. You’ll be happier in the long run.
