Hello my zesty little ice blocks! How are you all doing? Are you gazing out your window in awe of the snowflakes falling on the earth’s crust? Are you too reminiscing of this past Monday morning, at approximately 8:03 a.m., when the sun was kissing the tree branches that were heavy with snow, illuminating each individual twig with warmth and love?
If it wasn’t for the camera quality of letting me remember the moment above with precision, I definitely would think more seriously about switching from an iPhone to a flip phone, but alas, smartphones really just have an entire world at your fingertips that is hard to escape.
Around this time last year, I wrote a column on how to be yourself on social media. I guess people were interested in how I came up with the content that I did, and while honestly most of it was just what I call brain void, I have recently become to realize that this is much more difficult to achieve than I previously thought.
While I previously used my social media platforms with vim, I have recently begun to have an on-again-off-again relationship with it – and this seems to be a common theme with many people in the same age group of late teens, early twenties. Social media feels like it is one of those super toxic relationships that causes so much pain so you leave, but then you miss it and realize all the joy it also caused and so you go back, and then once you’re back you remember why you left in the first place…and repeat.
If you’re anything like me, the cycle of deleting social media apps and redownloading them seems to be never ending. While I find a lot of social media platforms to be an amazing tool for inspiration and knowledge, our lives have become so oversaturated with content that it also feels overwhelming and as though so much of life is a blur. I either sound like an ancient fossil of a crow, your inner monologue or maybe neither because I’m really not that special.
On one hand, without social media, where are we supposed to get our astrology memes that tell us what our personality traits are? Where will we see early-2000s Lindsay Lohan ankle bracelet fashion inspo pics? Where will we overshare with a group of people that we somehow know but probably aren’t really close to what’s going on in our life?
However, on the other hand, without social media there is so much time in the day for different activities such as reading “The Goldfinch,” doing 250 squats to Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love” (featuring Jay-Z) or staring into the void while drinking a cup of coffee.
There are a lot of factors to weigh when deciding whether social media platforms are for you — and major props to the people that actually come up with a decision. Hence the pro-cons list. An astrology Twitter account informed me that Libras (my astrology sun sign) are indecisive to a fault and make a pro-cons list for everything, only to make no decision because it took too long for them to decide, and so now they’ve forgotten what they’re even trying to decide between.
I didn’t need an astrologer to tell me that about myself but I guess the validation made me feel okay for deciding to not decide on anything ever in my life. While we may never get away from social media all together, taking a break from the virtual world can be rewarding, just as rejoining the apps can also be. Nonetheless, I hope you all find a sense of peace in your social media endeavors, whatever it may be, as I also walk through this journey with you.