“We would do well not to blindly follow the social media siren, which while promising connection and democratization, actually degrades well-being, makes us more opinionated and less related, empowers and enriches a few, monetizes our relationships and strips away our privacy.”
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This is a quote taken from the article, ” Is Facebook Destroying Society and Your Mental Health? New Research is clear: Deactivating social media can improve your life,” which was published on the Psychology Today website, in which writer Ravi Chandra expounds on the evidences supporting disconnection from social media (namely Facebook), the problems Facebook can have on relationships, self-image, mental health, and connection to society, and how essentially, instead of allowing Facebook to cause us to ultimately disconnect in some way from society, we would benefit relationally, mentally, and emotionally by disconnecting from Facebook.
Check out the article for yourself at the bottom of the page and decide if the pros of staying on Facebook outweigh the cons of staying on Facebook.
I can tell you from experience that I have permanently disconnected from Facebook three times in the past view years, the most recent decision being a mutual decision between my husband and I to permanently disconnect both of our accounts. I tried limiting myself on Facebook in every way I could think of to keep myself from becoming addicted and dissatisfied. I am not ashamed to say that Facebook caused problems in my own marriage: I was on mine and my husband’s way too much; I was spending far too much time on it than I was with my family; it was effecting my marriage, and it was effecting me–I would become so discontent after being on Facebook and bring up “problems” to my husband that I probably would have never thought about had I not been on Facebook in the first place. My initial reasoning for returning to Facebook when my husband and I got married was to use it as a sort of outreach tool to write and publish devotional-type notes that I felt would help others. After a time, no matter how much I wanted to justify all the good I was using Facebook for, I could no longer deny that I had once again fallen back into browsing endlessly anywhere from several minutes to over an hour, losing track of time in the process, and completely ignoring anything my children or husband was saying. When it gets to a point where your marriage and your family life suffer, as well as your emotional, mental, and even spiritual health, then it’s not very hard to disconnect from this social media addiction. And that’s what it is. An addiction.
As a Christian, I believe Facebook is extremely dangerous for marriages for all sorts of reasons and anyone who is married and has a Facebook account knows they have faced this realization before. I also believe, as a Christian, that it is dangerous for us as individuals because it produces fruits of greed, discontentment, jealousy, covetousness, idolatry, lust ( of the eyes and of the flesh), as well as the pride of life instead of the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, humility, and self-control. It allows people to portray themselves in a very dishonest, unrealistic way, promoting how they would like others to view them and who they would like to be rather than HOW they really are and WHO they really are.
It is time for me and my husband, me and my children, me and our family unit as a whole, to reconnect to each other, spend more time with each other, listen to each other more, invest in each other with the time we’ve been given instead of wasting that precious time mindlessly absorbed in other people’s business, and finding one another again. It is time to return to what is real. Real life. Real time. Right now.
Jessica
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Musings from Hearth and Home 