You may remember that one evening at the beginning of October 2021 Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp did not work. Now I ask you for how many people this was a problem, because they could not communicate, how many lost patience, how many wrote messages or made at least one call? How many realised they had six hours of empty space to fill and how many realised how much time they spend on social media and suddenly found themselves with nothing to do? How many decided to read a book, go to the neighbour's or watch television?
I myself learned from the radio that on Twitter the malignant were mocking what was happening to the competition. What did I do? I devoted time to myself, as I do every evening, with introspection, yoga, massage and meditation. However, it is true that social media are an integral part of our reality. Just think of the appointments, even work or school-related ones, that are organised on Whatsapp. Clearly there are beneficial effects, i.e. the speed of communication, but there are also negative effects, for example, if one has the tendency to check whether a person is online or has read a message. In addition, there are aspects that are not always conscious, namely how social media create mechanisms, so that one remains always online, I am referring to notifications that a person, whom Facebook considers important, has just posted or commented on a photo or video.
Now, social media can be addictive and like all addictions, there are several factors behind it, including a lack of self-respect and the inability to live with oneself and have access to real human contact and real love.
Since people tend to underestimate the amount of time they spend on social media, I invite you to see for yourself how addicted you are to social media:
- Remove the notification mode, i.e. by speaking on your iPhone, the red notification that comes to you, when you receive a message, on Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram. By the way, I would like to surrender attentively that from a strategic point of view, it was chosen the colour red for notifications, which psychologically, is the colour of the alarm or to pay attention, like the signal of the Stop, the fire extinguisher, in love the colour red means passion and therefore involvement: with the colour red there is speed you tend to react immediately.
- Similarly for Whatsapp, if you don't get notifications, how often do you go to look at what's next in a chat, if someone has written to you and if a person is online?
- Log out of FB and Instagram and promise yourself that you will not look at these social networks for a period of time that can be 48 hours or a week. How many times do you tend to click on these apps and realise that you have promised yourself not to look at them? How often do you feel the need to go on social?
Now, if you try for you to do this test and you realise that social media in some way makes an attack on you, maybe you will say, well I knew that maybe I was overusing it. What should concern you is how these social networks have affected your psyche and stolen time from your daily life. In that time, you could have given your loved one a caress, met a friend and played with your children. This time will never come again. The benefit of being with other people, with yourself and perhaps spending time in nature, without posting your activities, is the secret of life, which is stolen by the virtual world, which leads us to live in our heads and disconnects us from our body and soul needs.
If you are an adult, you can set a good example for the younger generations, who unfortunately do not know the carefree feeling of growing up without a smart phone. In this way you can help these new generations, who especially already because of lockdowns, have been deprived of the freedom to meet each other and live a life in a social circle. The long-term effects of this pandemic will be seen in the coming years and decades. Well, each of us has an incredible weapon to counteract the negative effects! This weapon is locked in your heart: love and presence, which, transformed into a caress or a long embrace, give the warmth of affection that everyone has been seeking since birth.