How to Limit Your Social Media Use
And why not limiting it just might kill the planet.
Yesterday I published an article on outlining the difference between empathy and compassion. In it I highlighted the idea that social media is taking up vast amounts of our neural capacity for empathy. Our mirror neurons are on a sort of constant bender from the time we wake up, check our smart phones, and continue blazing through our days with the incessant need of staying attentive to every ping in our social media feeds, not to mention the barrage of information we receive regarding the whims of our presidential child-in-chief. If you choose to look only briefly at how much social media is ruining our lives, you too might come to imagine how, not-so-far down the line, we will be facing the piper on the consequences of this bender. Let’s do everything we can to shift that tide, shall we?
As a millennial, I had the tragic privilege of being among the generation who witnessed the rise of Facebook when it was an exclusive website only accessible to college students with a .edu email address. Naturally I added it to the list of the websites I donated bits of attention to including Myspace and Xenga. I guess the reason those two are now obsolete is they didn’t do as good of a job in the way of becoming a highly addictive product. Facebook hired cocaine’s publicist and, surprise surprise, it. WORKED.
I’ve never taken drugs beyond nicotine, caffeine, and marijuana but I’ve heard the comedown from cocaine is exceptionally painful both physically and emotionally. I suspect it’s something like the feeling you get when Donald Trump gets elected President of the United States and you’re a Bernie Sanders or Hilary Clinton supporter. If you don’t know what that’s like but have experienced a difficult cocaine comedown, trust me, it’s like that. If you’re neither politically invested nor a cocaine user then I’ll do my best to give you a visual. Picture a heaping pile of human rubble who doesn’t get out of bed for several days, save the minimum requirements for subsistence. I spent weeks scouring the internet for articles explaining how this election possibly could have happened, landed on a few investigative pieces of Trump’s potential pedophilia habit with his pal Jeffery Epstein, and then decided, after weeks of repeating the bed>internet>work cycle, that I better get to actual work on something productive.
I moved home to Michigan to pursue a plan of starting a sister organization to the Alliance for Youth Action and Colorado’s New Era Colorado. Upon arrival, I was met with a barrage of warnings by my fellow organizers that there was an extreme left group forming from the bellows of the Michigan Young Dems.
Straight away the thing I noticed most strikingly about my experience with Michigan politics versus my Colorado experiences was the utterly devastating divisions within the progressive party. Don’t get me wrong, search hard enough and you’ll find divisions within every political party in every state in the union. However, Michigan held something uniquely painful.
Many years after being the gung-ho activist of the 2017 era that I was, I have realized something really compelling about that unique Michigan political division.
Michiganders, by and large, do not spend the majority of their time throughout the year outside in nature. Part of this is because the brutal winter weather makes being outside rather strenuous but I believe an even bigger reason is because they don’t believe there is anything to do outside, even during the most amazing summer weather one could imagine. Let’s investigate that a step further.
Why do we need something to “do” all the time anyways?
Is it because we were biologically programed as doers? Everything in my understanding of biology says not so much, but I do believe we are being culturally programed as doers through a little system called capitalism. Productivity and action, within a free market system, leads to a sense of pride and self-worth.
This is the same reason why going to Costco and buying “stuff” leads me to somehow feeling connected to the system. I don’t judge this feeling per-say, but I do notice it. Perhaps if you think about, you’d notice it too. Consuming and producing are inherent characters in the social fabric of our system. This is why we look at our smart phones all day as opposed to a few minutes here and there. This is why we spend $300 at Costco when we just went in for “a few things.” We want to feel as if we’re really a part of the social fabric.
Now we’re getting back to biology!
Being a part of a social fabric is genetically ingrained in the very essence of what it means to be human. Hell, it’s genetically ingrained in what it means to be alive in general. Genetic code seeks social cohesion at its foundation because without it, reproduction wouldn’t exist, and thus, the gene wouldn’t exist. For more on that thought experiment, do yourself a favor and read Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene.
So, how does all this relate to social media and our need to limit its use?
If you haven’t taken the time to watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix, please let this be one of the first things you consume on a screen (after this article, naturally). In the film, Director Jeff Orlowski does an incredible job of bringing to life the very real and present danger of the havoc social media is wrecking on the fabric of democracy, our mental health, and the promotion of political extremism. He does this by interviewing former top executives and leaders from Google and other mammoths in the industry including Tristan Harris, who is one of the leading promoters of the idea that we need to redesign social media, and quickly.
In the film, you can’t avoid learning how insidious these tech companies are by tapping into these aforementioned biological mechanisms, such as the desire for social cohesion through consumption and production. They uniquely and precisely become keenly aware of your socially constructed need to do and instead of helping you satisfy that need, they perform the most powerful social magic trick in history. This magic trick is through the subconscious conviction that by staying engaged with the system you have attained self-worth.
So, how are we supposed to find self-worth outside of this vast, all powerful network of social manipulation? The answer is so much simpler than you could ever imagine, and I’m going to give it to you, but first I want you to do me a favor. I want you to imagine what it would be like to have everything you ever needed; I don’t mean wanted as in driving that sick whip and living in a mansion, but truly needed. Seriously, close your eyes and don’t open them until you have fully envisioned what your life would look like and feel like if you had everything you needed.
Now, when you’re finished reading this article, I want you to look up the nearest green space in your area and I want you to take this vision with you on a walk in your nearby nature setting. If it wasn’t obvious, please leave your smartphone in the car.
That, my dear reader, is the answer to finding your self-worth outside of the social media matrix. It’s. That. Simple.
You see, this mother earth has for us the most unique ability to deliver an abundance of everything we need to heal from our culturally ingrained madness.
Call me radical if you like, but I believe the answer to human caused climate change, the answer to violent political division, and the answer to behemoth tech monopolies is to lean into this abundant healing capacity of nature.
We need to escape our incessant addiction to doing and instead simply imagine what it would be like to have our needs met. We then need to realize that, since the dawn of life on this planet, mother nature has already provided everything we ever could possibly need. Let’s spend quality time with her. And, what’s more, let’s take good care of her because if we don’t, it’s unlikely your Facebook page is going to save you from climate change.
Thank you so much for reading this whole article. Thank you for choosing to pursue feeling good inside of your own skin today and everyday. If you’d like help in this work, please reach out to my dear friend and amazing coach, Mandy Bishop. She is a nature-integrated trauma therapy coach and has truly helped change my life.
Please also consider trying meditation. I believe the most powerful action you can take for yourself is to wake up and meditate before you do anything else in your day. I currently use the Headspace app but another amazing choice is the Waking Up app by Sam Harris.
Love yourself first.
In love, light, and gratitude,
Lydia Catherine
