(Have you ever felt a sudden urge to open social media and try to make a new friend? Or have you ever felt a sudden pang of loneliness even though you have people around you?)
Hi all,
So what I am about to tell you is my ‘subtle art of not giving a fuck’ using which you can find who’s good for you and who’s not (if you are adamant that you are going to use social media anyway) and how you can not let social media affect your well-being. This is applicable on facebook and other social media sites.
So, let’s begin.
Okay, so we are all aware about the use of social media and its disadvantages. The so many researchers and psychologists have already pointed them out to us, and there are so many reasons! According to a report of the study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania in Nov 2018, use of social media increases depression and loneliness in individuals along with increasing anxiety and decreasing self-esteem. According to another report in early 2019, psychologists found that social media makes people’s behavior to become apathetic towards others, making them self-centered. On introspection you will find this to be quite true. Even if this is not completely applicable to you because you are not a constant user of social media or you do not feel the compulsive urge to take a picture every hour or every day and post it to Instagram of yourself or what you are doing, on thinking about it you will find that this makes perfect sense for the people who do this i.e., you can see how this is applicable to them because the act of updating every little thing on social media marks the psyche of having a need to tell the world what they are doing which in turn shows the self-centeredness of that individual. This shows that slowly and steadily their nature of behavior changes to being selfish – not caring about anyone else but feeling a constant need to satisfy oneself in terms of social validation in social media and real life. This behavior is worrisome especially when the majority of the population on social media is between 12 to 22 years of age.
Try to imagine this, you like a girl so naturally you want to talk to her to get to know her, so you send her a friend request, she accepts. Now you send her a message – you say hello- and await for her reply. She sees your message but does not reply anything back. How do you feel? You feel neglected (I know I have felt that way), even abandoned in some cases. If you take a good look at your account, you will find that out of so many of your ‘friends’ spanning from hundreds to thousands, you actually know a very few of them, fewer in real life. And this is where my method come in. So, my theory is that the people in your friend list must justify that they are your ‘friends’ because what is the use of having people in your friend list with whom you have never even had a conversation or who will never come out to help you when you are really in need in real life. What use is keeping such people in your list? It is like doing ‘Lean Management’ of social media. What is the use of keeping people who cannot add value or contribute in any way to your growth in life (Getting likes on your pics or a mere display of number of the amount of friends in your friend list is Not adding value).
In order to achieve this what I do is I open my friend list and I check how many people do I know and with how many I had a conversation with. The rest I remove from my friend list. Simple, huh? Well, not for the type of people I mentioned in the beginning. It is like quitting alcohol for an alcoholic or like quitting cigarette for a chain smoker. They experience a satisfaction due to their approval seeking behavior and that is how they validate themselves by the amount of likes they get or the increasing numbers in their friend list.
Now this piece of advice is for guys only:
So guys, you remember when your request was approved by a very cute girl and you sent her a message but she never gave any response even after seeing your message? Let me break something to you, if you ever see a girl’s account (Oh yes, I have seen) what you’ll find is that just like you there are hundreds of other guys who behaved just like you did. So, what to do? What I do is when I see a girl whom I don’t really know to be online, I say hello. If there is no response then just move on and the next time I see her online, I again say hello. I do this 3 times in total – 3 strikes! If after that there is no reply, I simply send her an additional message telling her that I am removing her (and not in the angry, egotistical way) and I remove her. What happened was that you tried getting to know a new person but since there was no response, it was like talking to a wall. So instead of sulking over it and enabling the social media to develop that same habit of seeking approval in you (which will gradually and silently metamorph into the psyche I mentioned above) and subsequently feeling sad about it, what you did was you nipped that habit in the bud by letting the attachment for that unknown person go. So in your subconscious mind, you simply didn’t gave a f**k about it. Make sense?
So, what are your thought about this? Agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments below.
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