Is Social Media a Necessary Evil?

Trying to find the balance between connection and noise

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I’ve gotten to the point that I have a love/hate relationship with social media. And even though there are multiple platforms to use, when I say social media I’m mostly talking about Facebook. I’ve used others over the years but that’s about the only one that I’m still on regularly.

On one hand…

• It’s where my friends are

• I have a community I’m a part of through a few different groups

• I can keep up with some extended family members easier

• Groups are a great tool for my personal business

• We can share our travel adventures and build a community for not only friends/family but other travelers as well

But on the flip side…

• It’s full of drama

• The number of ads is absolutely ridiculous

• People are so hateful and divisive

• I’m connected to a bunch of people I don’t even know that well and also people I knew ages ago but we don’t have any relationship anymore

• Everyone thinks they need to spout off with their opinion about EVERYTHING

• AI is starting to ruin it because so many people have no idea what’s real and what’s fake

Of course that isn’t an exhaustive list of the pros and cons but those are some of the top ones for me.

I think one of the ways that I can see how much social media has changed over the years is to look back and see how it was in the past. For example, if I scroll through my Facebook memories, I’ll see posts I made that had tons of people commenting and carrying on a conversation. These days it seems people just scroll and don’t engage as much. I see so many posts (mine as well as others’) that have very few comments - sometimes none at all.

What happened?

It used to be a place that we had conversations. It was a place that we built a community and engaged with one another. But nowadays it just seems like people are sharing anything they can that causes division, starting arguments about politics, getting into arguments when someone dares to disagree with them, or even spreading lies and misinformation with no regard to how that affects others.

It’s just sad.

And exhausting.

Sometimes I don’t even want to be online anymore. I just want to go off-grid and live life in my own little world away from all the noise. And it’s not that that’s not possible, but social media has become such a vital part of many things in our lives now that it would make certain things much harder if I wasn’t online anymore.

And as I said at the beginning, there are good things about it. My business is a business that’s built on relationships and community and it’s definitely given me that. I’ve been a Scentsy consultant for almost 15 years and when you’ve been with a company that long and taken care of customers for that many years, you build relationships around it. And I’m SO thankful for those. That’s really the only thing that keeps me going with social media! lol!

Back in the day when we were all getting online and starting to connect with others, I would friend request people that I met and I would accept friend requests from people who sent them to me. I ended up with so many people on my friends list that I didn’t really even know that it felt out of control. Why do I need to be connected to thousands of people online?!

It just got to be too much so I started going through and removing people. It wasn’t anything personal - it just seemed silly to be connected to all these people that I didn’t know. And eventually I even started removing people who I’d been friends with in the past but we no longer had a relationship for one reason or another. Again, it wasn’t anything personal but why do I need to be connected to someone I don’t ever see, we don’t have conversations at all, and they’re not a part of my life anymore? So I’m the kind of person that regularly goes through my friend list and removes people so I can keep my friends list somewhat small. Am I the only one? Do any of you do that?

But even though I’ve done that, there are still TONS of people on there that a part of me would like to remove but I have that fear of hurting someone’s feelings. But then I’m wondering - is that just me being self-centered? lol! Do they even care if they’re connected with me on Facebook if they literally never engage with me at all? Probably not.

I don’t really know if there’s a right answer for what to do with this social media conundrum. I don’t want to just walk away from the community I’ve built and I want to enjoy the friendships I’ve built with people online. But sometimes it truly is just exhausting.

I will say that one thing I’ve stopped doing that helps - I don’t sit and scroll the feed regularly. I do it occasionally but not all the time. I get on and get into my groups and engage with people who are a part of my life and try to leave it at that.

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What about you? Do you enjoy social media? Do you avoid it like the plague? Or are you somewhere in the middle like me? ;)