1:05 AM
Samrat Babu Koirala
I had been out of social media for 3 years and I thought I
would share my experiences and perhaps convince you on why you should leave and
why it is urgent.
Social media has deeply handicapped the new generation. More affected are girls than boys. While boys may use smartphones for games and porn, they are by nature less
subjected to the constant comparison of looks (albeit not the hierarchical
status.) The rate of depression which has been stable since the 80s has increased
from 11% to 20% in teenage girls in the last 9 years. (ONE OUT OF EVERY 5 TEENAGE GIRL IS DEPRESSED). In
college kids, it has increased from about 5% to 16%. The graph has risen
sharply after 2011 when social media became standards and smartphones were
regarded as a basic item. The rate of self-harm for teen girls has increased by
62% since 2009. The rate of self-harm for PRE-TEEN girls has increased by 189%.
So, NO, it is not because cases are more diagnosed. This thing is alarming.
We need to have awareness and humility to recognize that we are not sharing our photos to let others know what
is going on. We are sharing it because we look great in it and we want the
world to admire us and feel good about ourselves. While there is nothing wrong
with wanting to feel good about ourselves, this shortcut we have chosen is self-destructing. It is a self-defeating game. We are gambling our self worth to take a bubble bath in dopamine, to attain the approval of strangers who we don't care about.
It has made us heavily dependent on the audience to enjoy our victories. You should want it because YOU want it, not because you want to be clapped. The minute you need an audience to enjoy your victories, you are giving too much power to people who don't care about you. You after feeling happy about someone commenting something nice invariably opens the channel to feel sad when they don't. And if you have been paying close attention, it does not take more than one snarky comment to negate all the complements.
It has made us heavily dependent on the audience to enjoy our victories. You should want it because YOU want it, not because you want to be clapped. The minute you need an audience to enjoy your victories, you are giving too much power to people who don't care about you. You after feeling happy about someone commenting something nice invariably opens the channel to feel sad when they don't. And if you have been paying close attention, it does not take more than one snarky comment to negate all the complements.
We are not going to protect us, nor our girls with a mob on the internet that burns those who fat shame others or by repeatedly saying, “You are beautiful the
way you are.” We are all status-seeking monkeys and till the moment we don’t
know who we are, we are invariably letting our worth be determined by likes
and views. After all, we are the ones who are displeased with ourselves for not
being able to spend on vacation like Dude X, or having car-like dude Y or looks
like girl Z. Our anger at the world is merely an excuse.
We are not going to help ourselves or the kids by changing the word “mankind” with “peoplekind”. We can save them by helping them get off this
app. Until they can build a solid sense of who they are and they have self-worth built strong enough which they can into fallback to on bad days, being on this app is suicidal. It is
vitriolic to be on this app not because society tells you who to look like this or
any of that popular notions, but because it is deeply ingrained in our consciousness
to look for our status, to see where we fall on. And till we don’t know to our
core about who we are and where we fall, social media is bound to take us down
in its bottomless pit.
