This generation of traditional college students are, essentially, the first to have been raised on social media. You could debate that the Myspace era counted as social media, but it is nowhere similar to the current realm of social media.
When the social media boom occurred, current college students were at the perfect age where they were old enough to remember the world before social media, but young enough to become fully encompassed in the world of the socialization over internet. Today, as a, debatably, fully formed adult, I have seen what growing up on social media has done.
While I am eternally grateful to be living in a time and place where I can have a supercomputer in my pocket, I am not grateful for all the negative impacts that come being literally attached at the hip to a cellular device.
I have met peers who are unable to put their phones down for more than an hour at a time, with constant notification buzzing in on their phone and sneaking glances to see what just popped up. Reasons like this, along with the horrible negative emotional impact social media can have, led me to cutting social media out of my life entirely at certain points in my life.
While I have never been a major consumer of social media, there are points in my life where I have entertained the idea of keeping up with a page just as much as my peers. However, I have seen a major difference in just keeping up with social media and obsessing over it, and tragically most people do not know when they have gone too far.
Even though I was not interested in posting, seeing people constantly every day doing things that you are not a part of cannot be healthy for the brain. Even though most young adults know that it may all be a façade, that does not discount how seeing these posts make you feel. Everyone experiences even the slightest FOMO, and it is the escalation of this that can lead to extremely negative thoughts.
Not to mention the mind-numbingly high number of people who spend so much of their time obsessing with fighting strangers over the internet. Humans were not meant to deal with conflict with no consequences, a major part of conflict is that there is a very real person on the other side of the argument that can be affected by what you say and do. This is not what people consider when they are having a Twitter battle with some dude halfway across the ocean.
If you have never thought about it before, try thinking about going on a social media break. Whether it be for a day or a year, it is well worth it. Try and get back into the reality of real human connection, because while social media may be connecting us all it is killing our inherent emotions. I am not against the progress we have made with technology, but I am against what it has done to human interaction.
