5 Reasons Social Media is Dangerous

5 Reasons Social Media is Dangerous by Glennon Motley

"I've found that remarking on every remarkable thing just makes everything less remarkable."

1. Social media had transformed me into an input junkie. ...During every un-filled moment, I felt the urge to "check" something -- anything. Facebook, Twitter, my blog, Instagram -- just give me something through which to SCROLL! I had become unable to just sit with myself. I have "Be Still" tattooed on my wrist because I know that feelings, creativity, inspiration, wisdom, peace and the rest of the good stuff knock during empty moments -- and that if we're too "busy" to answer the door, they sneak into our souls through cracked windows and haunt us. We have to answer the knocks we hear in the quiet because it's our LIFE knocking. But sometimes, answering the door feels like too much to ask -- so, I log onto the Internet in order to LOG OUT of my life. I habitually log on for the same reason I used to overeat and get drunk -- to avoid what I know I'll hear in the quiet, which might be a voice that requires me to feel or do something uncomfortable. So, the Internet has become my enabler. It keeps me from stillness and discomfort, and this keeps me from growing.

2. I'd become a validation junkie, too. The hardest part of living without social media was remembering that my little life was enough, so I could just stay there and live it without asking for anyone else's permission or validation. I realized that for me, posting is like asking the world -- do you "like" me? Am I special enough? Am I funny enough, deep enough, smart enough, successful enough, love-able enough? How much do you like my opinion about this, that, and every other thing? .... It seems we're the first generation to graduate from high school -- to escape all of its competition and insecurity and desperation for belonging and attention -- and then to voluntarily throw ourselves RIGHT BACK into it.

3. Social media lured me toward shallow and rigid thinking. In order to navigate the Internet world, we learn to make things more black-and-white than they are in order to fit our thoughts into status updates and blog comments. When I was detoxing from social media, I realized that I was thinking in status updates. It seemed I had trained my brain to translate everything I experienced throughout the day into 140 characters or less. Everything complex became simple, everything beautiful became ordinary, everything three-dimensional quickly became just two. A week passed before I stopped automatically translating every indescribable moment, sunset or conversation with my kids into two sentences. I had to learn to stop shoving life into tweets and just let things be wild and big again.

4. Social media threatened my only source of real peace and joy, which is gratitude. All of this posting about my life shoved me out of THE MOMENT, which is where gratitude lives. Choosing to live my life out on social media meant that I was never truly present because as soon as a great moment presented itself to me, I jumped right out of it. My brain said, Well, this is something remarkable, and then leaped immediately to: how am I going to describe this, and where? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? With this, I moved right out of the moment, into my head and then onto my computer -- and just like that, the moment was lost. My kids might still be there, but I wasn't. The sunset might still be there, but I wasn't.

5. During my Internet fast, I learned that social media makes me feel bad. Halfway through my fast I decided to cheat, because that's just the kind of person I am. I logged onto Facebook and clicked on a post from another blogger whom I love and respect and for whom I wish All The Good Things. Her post was an announcement that she had just won a well-deserved writing award, and as I read her good news, I started to notice that my stomach was tightening up. I "scanned my body" to check for input, as my yoga teacher taught me. And I noticed that my shoulders were sagging and I felt a flutter in my chest like a low-grade panic. What the hell, I thought. What's going on here? What was going on was comparison. I was comparing my life to hers and as they say, comparison is the thief of joy. Like I once heard an Olympic swimmer say: "I swim best when I mentally stay in my own lane." No matter how satisfied I am with my stroke and my pace before I log on, Facebook shoves me right out of my own lane and back into the ridiculous hunch that I'm not good enough, that I'm missing something important, that I don't have enough peace and success and that everyone else is living a more fulfilling, fabulous life than I am. If Facebook has this effect on us, we can forgive ourselves. Because all we're doing is using it exactly the way it was intended to be used. Facebook was designed by college boys to decide how "hot" one woman was compared to another, and now we use it to decide how hot one woman's life is compared to another's. Sometimes.

When I was in college, I went out partying every night because I had a serious case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). FOMO is powerful and sometimes compels us to make less-than-healthy choices because we don't want to feel left out. I wonder if FOMO is what keeps many of us so closely tied to social media. On my Internet fast, I learned that I was right to have FOMO, because I was missing something, and it was my real life. These people -- the ones in my home and in the post office and in my kids' school and in my neighborhood -- they are real life, and my real life deserves my full and undivided attention.