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Don’t Take a Break From Social Media. Manage It.
As someone who recently checked my phone 1,000 times in a week, I’m finally learning how
A couple weeks ago, as I stared vacantly into my phone, my wife offered a gentle observation about the amount of social media I’d been consuming. Her kind implication: I was spending too much time on Facebook.
“Honey,” I replied, “it’s no big deal — I’m just checking to see if anybody outside of our house remembers that I’m still alive.”
She sighed, patted me on the head, then walked into the other room.
Alone with my thoughts and my mobile lifeline to the rest of the planet, I tried to assure myself I was only joking. But my words contained an ugly and undeniable truth: Even as I’m quarantining with my wife and two kids, the people I love most, I am starving for human connection.The numbers supported her observation. According to Apple’s Screen Time, I had picked up my phone almost one thousand times the previous week.
Look, I’m all for cutting ourselves a break during quarantine, but this is not the behavior of someone practicing self-kindness! This is a cry for help. Like an over-caffeinated Eleanor Rigby, I’ve been compulsively grabbing my phone and tapping blue logos in the hope that someone on the other side would say to me:
“I see you.”
“I miss you.”
“You have a great nose.”
I am by no means hating on social media. Full disclosure: I am very proud to have worked at Facebook for several years. It’s also important to remember that Facebook is neither inherently good nor evil (though the company has rightly fallen under scrutiny for how it handles privacy and the distribution of misleading information). Ultimately, it is how we use the platform — and social media in general — that determines whether it creates a net benefit or detriment to our lives.
Every game, ride-sharing, news, e-commerce, and music app on our phone is designed to entice us into returning as often as possible for a quick fix of…
