1.Comparing
I cannot believe Pete has bought a summer house, look at Susan’s beautiful family, Mark is looking super jacked, Paul is an amazing baker, just look at that sourdough. Here I am hunched over scrolling through the highlights of others lives, in each case a little part of me is jealous of the perfect smiles and chiseled abs. Sure I am keeping up with my friends, but how much do I care? How did people survive and keep in touch for generations before the social network? How is this scroll helping me and my life? Often a Facebook scroll can get me down, the bombardment of others perfect images can lead me to wonder – why is my life not amazing? We do know behind all these photos are real lives with real difficulties and struggles but our eyes can sometimes deceive our mind. We must focus on making our own days amazing without the need of sharing and without the constant need for updates on others lives.
2.Advertising
The reach for the phone, the emails have become too much, let’s just have a little scroll and see what’s going on in the world. What a wonderful way to keep up with my 1623 friends. As I look at my ex-school friends sisters trip with her family to Wisconsin I notice the next post is ‘promoted’, ugh, what is this for? Trainers, I don’t need trainers yet I have looked at it, I have succumbed to the first rule of advertising – I noticed it. Even though I know I don’t want to look at the advertisements in my feed it is impossible to fully ignore, some part of my psyche will take in it’s content. Maybe this is the seed that will grow to full bloom next time I am in the mall.
3.Clickbait
Another form of advertising is clickbait. Getting you to leave your Facebooks feed and jump somewhere else….
Man eats his own underwear, you won’t believe what happens next….
What every mother must know about killer germs….
18 things that will make you a billionaire in 14 seconds…
3 teas that will guarantee you ot lose 15lbs in a day…
Why do they want you to visit their site? Well it leads straight back to advertising. The whole internet business model is built around getting you to hyperlink to places where you will spend your money. We find it so hard to resist clickbait, that is a reason to remove the temptation, remove Facebook. How many hours of your life have you wasted following the clickbait hyperlink? You didn’t get on Facebook to see clickbait but it is what you may end up doing every time. If we want to lose weight, we don’t keep going to the doughnut store to look but not touch. If you want to remove clickbait and constant advertisement you must remove Facebook from your life.
4.The Like Addiction
The ‘like’ is a dangerous weapon of addiction. The cocaine of the online world. We post and we wait, the first ‘like’ brings relief, followed by the checking, double checking, triple checking and oh we know we keep checking. What on earth are we checking? We have already seen our photos, we are of course checking the likes and the comments. Has our post got enough likes, has it satisfied our need for likes, yes it has, ahhhhhh and we lie back in like induced ecstasy. Recently I posted photos of my wedding which received my highest ever number of likes, I was so satisfied, I don’t even know why. People who never before liked one of my posts liked this one, how do I even know that? A part of me wanted to post more wedding photos to get more ‘like buzzes’, but what if this new post received less likes? I would probably not be happy. This is addiction, wanting more and more, while only being satisfied for a very short time when you get what you want.
5.Wasted Time
In essence the worse part of social media and Facebook is the time that can be wasted on it. Instead of picking up a book, being creative, meditating, having a conversation or going for a walk when we have 20 minutes we just hop on our phone and it’s gone. Our time on this planet is finite. That 20 minutes will never be come back again. It has essentially been wasted. The other way to look at it is maybe this is what living has become, the things we value are now social media related. I could be wrong, this modern world may see this as time well spent. The question really is – are you content to be caught in the social media wave or do you wish to pursue a different path? This is your choice, you be you. You can decide to remove Facebook from your life, maybe for a trial period and see what happens. This could be the extra time in your day you need to focus on you, to focus on your wellbeing. Maybe this time will be the making of you.
FIGHT LAZINESS 