Mindless scrolling through social media

Social media allows you to lie in bed the whole day, carrying your phone and doing nothing. It’s a fake world but yes, it has a lot of benefits too.

You can scroll through dozens of deep hardcore ideologies in less than 60 seconds (which sometimes deserve hours to process) out of a feeling of missing out because the status is going to disappear in the next 24 hours.

Sometimes, it feels like opening the room window on a stormy night to receive a gust of heavy wind blowing at your face, sand grains filling your eyes and ears. The hardest part is you instantly want to close the window with a heart heavy and mind numb, but you cannot. You simply cannot, because it has already become an addiction in no time.

You can portray a deluding self-image of what you wish you were and not what you are in your real life. You can get a feeling as if all things are in your control, and it’s you (not Pentagon) who are running the whole damn world through your Twitter account.

You can convert a bad feeling into good instantly by posting a new status, getting likes and comments and helping you to avoid thinking why you felt bad earlier in the first place. It can shift your priorities and isolate you from your surroundings within seconds while you are sitting at a cousin’s birthday party, checking emails, scrolling through Facebook, researching how to get real Instagram likes, or replying to random people on WhatsApp which you can and should do later.

It holds you back from the real world, real people, real confrontations and discussions and the real connections around you. You sit together in a chat box with 38 other people online, but it makes you feel alone more than ever. It’s just like you get more lost when you are around more people. You can post a copied thoughtful status without giving it a deep thought yourself and get Wow reactions in seconds. You can so easily become a social media hero.

All this to replace your sense of inactivity and boredom with a sense of false accomplishment? I will not be writing this if I really felt its benefits outweigh the risks in most cases, and if those benefits are lasting. What I am concerned about is the impact it’s casting on our natural human thinking process: hastening it, superficialising it, shifting its habit of reading in-depth analytic articles to mere memes to know what’s happening in today’s world.

Social media feels to me like a conspiracy to undo human emotion of utility and value: the habit of just sitting at bedtime and telling raw stories to each other. You may argue one needs escape to undo the harshness of life, but isn’t it we who choose them after all?