When dealing with social networks, you should first ask yourself, why am I getting this service for free anyway. You have to realize that there are no free gifts in life, the real and only profitable product that converts money is you. Say it again out loud, I am the product, that’s the deal.
So, you are the end product of social media. Now, in order to trade you, they need to build a perfect digital reflection of you. Every image you like, every sentence you type, every emotion you share, and especially every fear or angry you manifest is recorded and tracked down by the pace you scroll the feed, by measuring the time you ponder and pause on top of your friend’s image, by summing up your search queries and measuring precisely how long it takes you to respond to any notification or every other enticement they feed you up with.
All these pieces of data are the building blocks of your digital profile that reflects you and predicts you. You are lead through to keep on giving away personal and sensitive information by the name of ‘social sharing’ and never stop building your digital reflection to make sure it will always be aligned with the real you so that they will get the best price out of trading your digital reflection for advertisement. The sad true fact is that they know better of you than you do.
When putting this state of affairs into perspective, you have no odds of winning this battle. While you only begin to ponder and re-estimate the ramifications of this daily habit you have, they already trapped you down into this pit. You are standing alone against an army of well-paid psychological and technological engineers.
The biggest absurdity in this whole story is that every time you or your child feels bad or in some physical pain, you immediately rush to consult a doctor, take care of the wound and do whatever it takes to heal up. But when it gets to your mind, which is the solely driver that determines all you are, you treat it as a trash bin. You literally become a fool.
You are simply tolerant of absorbing huge quantities of garbage into your mind day by day. If you eat McDonald’s every single day in your life, you will soon end up in the hospital, suffering from high blood pressure and prone to heart attacks. But when you are feeding your mind with the social networks junk-media food, you don’t feel bad. Rather you crave for the next time you’ll be lost within the social feed, boosted with high loads of dopamine that will make you feel high, just like a drug addict.
In fact, you won’t need any hospital because you are already dead. You may be playing your social role in life, but you are dead from the inside. You are trying to conceal the enormous void that you feel with your life. Still, as you get drawn more and more into this swamp of mud, the void is only growing bigger and bigger, and your life gets emptier from a true sense of meaning, happiness, or true friendship. You become the end product of other’s business strategy, whereas your only strategy is to conceal your pain and hook yourself into the digital machine once again.
You might think that social networks are bringing you closer to your friends, but in fact, you are trapped in meaningless feelings-gestures digital-circle. Instead of having a genuine conversation and meaningful relationship with a few friends, you are only trading social approvals for other’s lack of self-esteem and lack of authenticity that is called “likes”.
You are simply playing a role in a theater of shades, building up your solitude prison while amplifying others’ solitude with emotional verifications for their digital bubbles. You are missing out on the authentic experience of being that no digital experience can provide. You miss out on being present at the moment and paying attention to the presence of your loved children, your family members, and even the presence of foreigners on the street, and everywhere you go.
You feel that you are everywhere, irritated by a desire to catch up with everything and everyone. Nevertheless, you are lost, floating above reality, not engaged in anything. While the clocks ticks, and this sums up to be your life. You give up for free the most precious asset you have in life, and that is your presence in the moment and your time.
You might think that you are multi-tasking, or maybe famous or an important person because you get some false applause from the audience on social media. But in fact, your mental capacity to focus, learn in-depth content, and get things done efficiently is getting worse day by day. Because you are boost with dopamine, you can’t acquire the required patience to sit down and focus. You are distracted by notifications and false alarms that constantly demand your attention. Try to recall when was the last time you actually read a book or set your focus on a complicated task without checking out your phone? Once your focus is split and your attention is distracted, they win the bottle. You will never be able to push forward the things that you want in life. They want you scattered into million pieces. They want you fool, impatient and always-distracted because they wish to drive the vehicle of your consciousness for you, that’s the deal.
You might have told yourself once – what could be so harmful or dangerous with having some digital entertainment. Well, think twice, my friend, think twice.
