A world without social media.
The thought struck me as I sat there. Waiting for my breakfast.
Phone-less, whilst My Love was on his phone, social pictures occupied his attention. My new found sense of philosophical questioning occupied mine...
"Imagine what life would be like if social media had never been invented... Actually, imagine if there was not even internet…"
Immediately, I’m transported away from the cafe where we were spending our morning, and I land abruptly back in my late teens. Long phone calls with best friends. Dinners with family. Afternoons in a park reading a book. Pages and pages of handwritten letters to pen-pals from childhood… Ahhh to be that age again.
It wasn’t just the absence of my phone that helped the thought finally cross my mind. Like the chicken crossing the road, the idea of getting off social media had run back and forth narrowly missed by the passing traffic of my congested mind for many months. But now it had reached the other side.
I don’t think it has anything to do with my age. Now in my late thirties the last few years and all my friendships seem to have disappeared in a fog of Facebook, Instagram and Google. I no longer even had phone calls with close friends. Our relationships based solely on Likes, Comments and Shares. And the very occasional instant message.
The busy-ness of corporate careers, online businesses, and the overwhelming struggle of just trying to keep heads above water, had resulted in a loss of connection, a loss of authentic heart-felt interaction and a loss of a way of life that did not consider a return on every transaction...
Is this really what life has come to? I miss calling people without needing a reason. I miss not using someone's scheduling system to book a friendly catch up. I miss the randomness of surprise drop-ins. And I miss having time all to myself. I miss replying to messages or emails without an impending sense of desperate urgency. With no device demanding my attention, determining my priorities or infecting my sense of who I am.
I miss a life without all of the unspoken rules of courtesy and good manners which seem to have come (unmentioned in the user guide) with the powerful device we hold in the palm of our hands...
I miss leaving the ability to be accessed at home or in the office where it rightfully belongs. (Since when has being un-contactable for any period of time been the greatest rebellion - this used to be the norm!)
And I miss knowing that when someone answers the phone it's because their full attention is on the person at the other end, not on multi-tasking and checking their email at the same time...
So many distractions, so many obligations, so many ways to contact and to connect, yet a feeling of such deep disconnection from everything that used to really matter, most prevalently, a deep disconnection with the true notion of self...
I’m aware completely that it is all a state of mind, all a personal choice, all an ability to exercise boundaries and establish our own way of being around the digital world. But it is now such a fundamental part of life in Western society that to remove yourself from the world of social media is considered personal and business suicide. How fluffed up is that?
A tool that was designed to connect has only increased the delusion we live in.
Numb to reality, lives are lived online and not in the real physical world. Loneliness is now considered one of the biggest killers of our time, but imagine if all the time we had invested in navigating the online world was instead spent navigating and building communication skills in the real world. How different would our lives be...
My morning of philosophizing over a bagel with cream cheese, turned necessarily into an afternoon of working on a laptop. There is no escaping the truth of how masterful the digital world is.
However, I realize it is still possible to take matters into my own hands. We can create our own updated version of the life we had before smartphones. The time away from our devices can be celebrated as a victory and not admonished as a failure to keep up with the world.
And ‘old-fashioned’ forms of connection can be treated as an art, to be remastered, relished and enjoyed.