These modern times where we live in an era of advanced technology, high speed internet available at our fingertips, and countless social networking apps that allow us to connect with people all around the world, with a click of a button we can be a part of our friend’s lives living at different continents in the world, and with a click of a button we can share our most important and beautiful moments or phases of life.
We can have a hundred opinions from around the world in a matter of minutes about anything we want to and we can suggest a hundred things to the people living even in the remotest corner of the world. So, I think it would be very safe to say that advancement of technology has made us more connected than we have ever been, it has brought us more closer to each other even when are millions of miles apart and in older times we couldn’t have thought it was even possible to be a part of such closely knitted web that can connect you to every nook and corner of the world in a matter of seconds and the world will be in your hand and just a click away to be explored virtually.
But as we go deeper into the study of this closeness we come to realise that if the advancement of technology has brought us so close to each other. How come there are even more number of socially isolated people in real life? If technology has helped us maintain a very good connection with all of our friends and family why do people still feel lonely and get depressed and isolate themselves eventually leading to Suicides? Why do relationships seem fake and why do we see everyone complaining about having trust issues and not being able to connect in real life with people?
Why are our suicide rates higher than ever?
Why the number of depression cases is getting higher and higher every day?
Why do people develop and suffer through various psycho-social problems?
Why are we emotionally and psychologically so vulnerable that the only way out seems to be self-harm?
Why are we so very adjustable and easy to get along with on social networks whilst we find it difficult to do the same in real life?
Here i am not trying to degrade the place and value of social networking and technological advancement, instead what I am emphasising is the need and dependency we feel in our lives upon social networking and technology in general, We have become so very dependent upon it that we don’t actually realise that we are missing out on real life. We try and condition our brains to find our happiness virtually. We have hundreds of friends online. Who we text to, who we chat and talk with. But when we close our social networking sites, shut down our computer or cellphone, who do we actually have with ourselves?
How many of us do really meet up and interact with strangers in a park?
None, actually, because we aren’t supposed to, because we don’t know how those people are gonna turn out and react to us interacting with them, but how many of us follow those self-made rules and regulations of interaction with strangers on social media?
The answer to that as well is none, because in our heads our virtual space is our safe space, place where we can express ourselves better, express our emotions better, interact with strangers and make new friends in them, but have we ever thought that all this display of emotions and interactions is getting faker and faker along the way somewhere, have we ever questioned ourselves about why do we need all those likes and all those comments? Why do we need that technologically social acceptance? Why do we feel like a compulsion to check and re-check our posts and see who liked, who disliked and who said what about our very own emotions?
Why is it that every time we get a negative comment we feel more affected and hit by it than a damn! Tornado itself?
I know many of you might be thinking right now. Well! That doesn’t happen with me, but deep down even you know that you crave that social attention, That acceptance and the feeling of belongingness you get when your posts hit huge number of likes and comments, you feel satisfied, fulfilled once your posts blow up, that’s from where the process of social loneliness (as I call it) starts because once you’ve hit the mark. Then you feel the pressure, the pressure to do better next time, the pressure which spins you round, makes you go take a million pictures and choose one to post it, because you need those likes and if they don’t come you wouldn’t be sated.
Then in that pressure you neglect your real emotions and start posting and pretending to be someone who you are not, you make your life look picture perfect. When actually it isn’t that way, you share your emotions and moments online pretending to be happier than you actually are, and whilst doing that you are slowly isolating yourself from people existing in your real life, at first you find your happiness online, among the group of people who you think are exactly like you.
In terms of feelings, emotions, liking, disliking, and what not, you start living two lives at the same time, one is a virtual life while as the other is the real life you have which you tend to ignore every time you hop into that virtual rollercoaster and ride away with the thrill and fun of it and all this happens so gradually that you don’t even realise that it’s actually happening, until you reach a point, a point where all the fun and thrill starts to vanish away, where you start to realise that you doing a double time living two lives is of no good to you.
A point where you realise that virtual acceptance ain’t enough, where you need someone to be by your side in real life but you find none, because the world you created for yourself, the happiness you got was all virtual and not real, and that’s where the process of technological depression starts
And you start going into self-hate, you think of yourself as not being good enough, like you are lacking something, which you actually aren’t, then you start feeling lonely, as if you had the world in one minute and in another you had nothing, and all that leads to the only way, the road to the socialised loneliness; it’s sadly amusing that how we subject our happiness on a virtual world we create and ignore the real world, and eventually come back to real world to find the same happiness that we have already misplaced and mis-attached to something else. Technology is no longer a part of our lifestyle it has become the lifestyle itself and that’s why we may feel so incomplete and lonely because the more we dive into it the more we lose the taste and fun of simple things in life.
We share our virtual emotions with each other but no one actually knows what we feel for real, because they see what we make them see and they cannot see beyond that. No one can see beyond a fake smile in a picture, because we have them believed that our life is exactly as it looks in the posts, and we do the same with others as well. We think that all the people who post their lives as perfect online are actually living the same life and then we put ourselves and our emotions in comparison and unknowingly get ourselves drowned into more self-pity and self-hate at the same time, and that is what makes us chaotic inside out.
Actually the truth is that no one is as happier as they show online, you can never make out a difference between real and fake happiness virtually, but doing all this we are not only tricking people into believing that we are happy but we also trick ourselves, and may be that is why when the moment of realisation comes to us most of us cannot even handle that and give up to the first and most stupid thoughts that comes to mind.
It’s like self-caging ourselves, getting used to the feeling and then not wanting to come out of it. After reading this you might think I am asking you to give up on technology and social networking all together but that’s not what it is. This is meant to make you understand whether you are using technology or you are being used by it.
All this was made to make us feel more connected when actually how we use it has gotten us more away from each other,
Studies show that due to the excessive use of technology and social media, people have developed a dependency upon it which leads to various psychological problems and diseases like FOMO (fear of missing out), insomnia due to problems with circadian rhythms, depression, and not to mention the ill effects of electronic gadgets on eyes and brain.
Technology is not the problem the way we use it is where the problem lies and that is where we need to find the loopholes and fix them to have a better life in real and not a virtual one.