Tag: addiction

Abandon social media

Posted on by philipdodson

What if we all abandoned our social media for, say, a day? Weird, eh? Especially as I will share this blog on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in about 5 minutes time!

Instead, we could actually talk to people face to face or pick up our smartphones and actually ring someone and speak to them in like a conversation type thing. That would be really weird, eh!

You know people do ‘dry’ January and don’t drink booze for a month in order to prove to themselves and the world that they aren’t addicted and don’t need alcohol to numb. Maybe we could have ‘drama-free’ Feb, ‘attention-seeking free’ March, ‘Twitterless’ April…and so on. We could go weeks without sharing a picture of our lunch. Maybe a step too far, now I’m being ridiculous.

The point is, as a reforming social media junkie, we just don’t need it as much as we think we do and there is a completely different real and amazing world occupied by wonderful human beings to be discovered. A place where we can have real and meaningful conversation, hugs, laughs, tears and so much more.

Abandon social media for a day, or a week or perhaps longer. Millions worldwide are. You can still read this blog directly, if you want.

Radical? Maybe. But just 10 years ago what did we all do with our hands?

It’s addictive

Posted on by philipdodson

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat…they are corporations, whose goal is to make money for their stakeholders.

It’s no surprise then that they work super hard to make their platforms addictive for users so that the more time they spend their the more adverts and other business opportunities they can serve up.

The questions as the user is, does this serve me well? Is this adding value to my life? What else could I do with the time that I spend here? What difference would this make to my life if this didn’t exist? Will this affect my self-worth, self-confidence, mental health? The list of questions could go on.

We often forget to ask questions about value anymore as we have fallen into the ‘any benefit’ trap. One single benefit is often enough, where previously humans, with more limited resources, we had to evaluate much more.

The addictive nature of social media leads to less evaluation and more time lost with the only gains to be had for the owners of the platform.