We have all been in that situation where social media has either destroyed us or destroyed someone we know. Social media has gone extremely far, to the point where it’s very hard to imagine a life without it, let alone how to retract from it. How do we go back from social media and save ourselves now?
Social media is a series of dopamine fixes when someone likes or comments a photo. It’s a vicious cycle of dopamine satisfaction. What people don’t realize is that the long-term effects of social media addiction is something that we cannot fathom because we would be the first generation to enter those repercussions. Why are we destroying our generation by feeding into this destruction? You may not see it as something that destroys you and social media may be a way “to keep in touch with friends” but, I call bullshit on that! Social media may “connect” you with friends, but so does text messages if and when someone needs to get a hold of you and perhaps the normal way of meeting someone face-to-face would take care of “connecting” with friends. Ask yourself, do you really need social media? When I use the word “need”, I mean NEED it. And if you do, you are addicted, whether you admit it or not. Facebook founders have come on record to say that social media was created to consume as much of your time as possible. Also, your feed was purposely programmed to either be more negative or positive to make you that type of person and social media algorithms followed your actions online to find out how skewing your feed affected you. Still don’t believe me?
Even if you just took 20 minutes in the day to scroll feeds and did not care about posting anything, then they are still controlling some amount of information that is going in your brain to program you to be a certain way. YES – all media online does that. However, social media’s intent was to purposely program you the way they wanted. Studies showed that playing videos games gives you the same type of dopamine effect that social media does. When social media founders figured out how and why video games became addicting, they purposely took that information regarding the most basic type of human vulnerability and created billion dollar companies. This was all to manipulate YOU. It doesn’t really matter if you are not that active on social media, or you don’t post anything, what matters is that you are feeding the beast and you have an open channel for them to program you without you knowing and without you accepting this FACT.
So what do we do now? Now that we are so far ahead in life with all this social media, what do we do know? How do we go back? How do we cut all that out before 90% of our generation ends up with psychological problems as we get older (already exhibited in our generation today). What do we do now? Here’s an idea that even the slimiest of social media founders might like and general humanity might also. If social media founders started charging for access to these applications, they would cut out more than half the bull shit that exists on those apps. I know you hate me for talking about charging for these apps, BUT, hear me out. If you truly are on social media to “keep in touch with friends” and you really don’t have any other way to stay in touch, then you most likely will find it worth it to pay a subscription fee to stay on that platform. If you don’t find it worth it, then you would take yourself off those apps. That cuts out at least 50% of the users, meaning 50% of the users will already start rehabbing from social media addiction. That cuts out 50% of lives that can be potentially destroyed with social media (people sending devastating messages, posting pictures that destroy people, etc.). Obviously this won’t solve the entire problem, but this would significantly reduce the number of people using social media. Lets say all social media platforms began charging their users, we could then start controlling social media ourselves.
We, as humans, are weak. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are all free and all prey on our weakness, on our vulnerability. We can’t help but sign up for these sites and join that circus. BUT, if those sites decided to charge people, it’s an EASY way to say NO to social media and not even think twice about it. This article is NOT for your selfish needs and wants just because you are “popular” on social media and oppose my solution of charging people, this article is for the majority of people suffering from the backlash of social media. I have seen enough lives destroyed because of social media and I am speaking up NOW because this problem is getting WORSE. When social media addiction becomes the number one diagnosis when we’re all older and no longer good enough to sustain those likes and comments that we used to get, then we’ll all sit with regret and hatred for social media at that time. Why let it get that far? The repercussions are REAL. Something MUST be done about social media NOW.
