Why I Post Less on Social Media.

I am on several different social media platforms. I used to post all the time, but the amount I post has declined quite a bit over the last few years. Since the introduction of social media there have been many studies, and its generally accepted that social media has a very detrimental effect on our mental health, and much of my change of posting habits can be traced back to my mental health.

Once I realized that, my habits changed. Now, when I do something my thoughts are not on taking pics or recording it for social media. Which is not to say that I don’t anymore, but its not my primary concern. Now, when doing something memorable my focus is enjoying myself first. If there is no record of it, so be it! It still happened, and (hopefully) I still enjoyed myself. Why should my enjoyment of something be lessened after the fact if no one on social media “likes” my pics?

I won’t say that my mental health completely rebounded after my change in attitude toward social media. I still blog (obviously) and my posts do not attract a ton of attention, but I try far harder to not assign more value to likes and views than they warrant. My focus now is how my posts and pics make ME feel, not how they make others feel.

Which is far more difficult to do than a person would expect. There is so much pressure in our society and culture to get the approval of others, to act a certain way or look a certain way, to BE a certain way. Even more so now that social media can actually provide a living for people that are successful, aka: popular. But popularity comes at a cost. We distort our lives, looks, personalities, and beliefs in order to become popular, and if enough people distort themselves, then soon our culture becomes distorted.

If you are paying attention you can see it happening, and personally I find it terrifying. So I have made the deliberate choice to participate as little as possible.

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