Are You Substituting Real Life For Online Life?
By: Fatima Mohammed
Tags: Social Media, Mental Health, Addiction, Insecurity, Culture

Are You Substituting Real Life For Online Life?

How easy it is to fall into the mindless scrolling routine and not even notice

One of my favourite parts about social media is how easy it is to get lost in all it offers, especially when you’re in dire need of a distraction. All you’re required to do is scroll through and it engulfs you. You’re in a trance, wandering through the land of tweets, pictures, stories and best of all–memes. It’s working. You’re laughing, it’s distracting you from your problems; it’s great. Until it’s not. But you don’t realize this for a while. Most people don’t.

I’ve found that most of us don’t know who we are or the reason we do the things we do. There’s this set image we have of ourselves, the person we believe we are (which is most likely the person we were at a point but aren’t anymore). We haven’t processed the fact that we’ve grown and changed into a different person over time–sometimes negatively. This is the reason why when other people tell us we are at fault or have a flaw, it’s tough to admit. We assume if it were true, we would have noticed. We feel we are fully in control of ourselves and unsusceptible to any form of change we don’t condone.

When people spoke about their unhealthy relationship with social media, I scoffed and thought “can’t be me.” Like most people do, I believed I was immune and those kinds of things don’t happen to me. That I’m too smart to let it happen. So I was indifferent about my relationship with social media, never giving it much thought.

Twitter is my most used platform, so when I refer to social media, it takes up ninety percent of that space in my life. At the start of the year, I went on breaks I planned to be a weeklong but ended up barely lasting three days. Every time Twitter triggered any negative emotion, I’d deactivate my account only to be back in a week right where I started, mindlessly scrolling and falling deeper into this virtual world. It got worse every time I came back. I knew I needed to distance myself, but I didn’t know how to do it.

It took some time, but I finally saw I had become so attached that I had substituted my actual life for it. I was in a “social media induced reverie” where I was more concerned with maintaining my image online than dealing with the life in front of me. The way I looked and portrayed myself there mattered more. I ended up spending more time online than I needed to.

My mental health was suffering. It gave me anxiety; I compared myself to random people I didn’t know and wished I was living their lives–they seemed to have things under control. Social media is supposed to be fun, but it wasn’t anymore. It was an act I was trying to keep up with but couldn’t because of how quickly things change on there. It kept outrunning me; I kept falling short, and it exhausted me. I asked how much of myself I will sacrifice for a world that existed on-screen.

After my previous failed attempts, I tried another social media break but this time with a purpose and no set time frame so as to reduce the pressure — this time, for as long as I could manage. My goal was to come out of it less attached, dependent and influenced by social media. To stop being obsessed with the image others had of me in their minds and how to tweak it in my favour.

I stayed away from Twitter for a month and two days. I was so proud of myself because not too long ago, I couldn’t handle three days without a relapse.

The best thing during this break was the peace of mind I experienced. There was no image “upkeep” to worry about. No one to compare myself to. I felt a lighter, like this baggage I had been dragging around wasn’t with me anymore. It was amazing. The thing about a social media hiatus, it forces you to do things you keep putting off because all the time you complained you never had is suddenly there. So, I tried to create a habit out of reading an article a day; I immersed myself in books, movies and music that I loved and worked on improving my writing.

I saw that the more I stayed away, the more I wanted to stay away. I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where I would consider leaving social media for good–especially Twitter. But I started contemplating never going back because I realised it took way more than it gave me and memes weren’t a good enough reason to stay.

Although, I’m not so ignorant and dense as to believe that Twitter is the sole cause of all my problems. They existed prior to Twitter but it just happens to be a trigger and contributor to the bigger issue of my insecurities which I need to deal with personally. Even if I leave Twitter behind, it wouldn’t take long for something else to trigger the anxiety and misbelieves in me and get me struggling with the issues I thought I left behind when I gave up Twitter.

After pondering on it for a long time, I decided not to give it up. I’ve learnt a lot from Twitter, made amazing friends and gotten a lot of inspiration. It was the way I engaged with it and let it get to me that was the problem. So the plan is to use it in moderation, to my advantage and surround myself with people and things that inspire me not things that bring me down and make me depressed. And more importantly to take the space to work on myself away from all social media.

But saying these things and doing them are different. Going back, I’ve found it’s easy to get sucked back in and fall into the mindless scrolling routine again. So, I have to give myself time to work out the best combination that won’t leave me down. I know the journey isn’t linear and I don’t know how much time it’ll take. But I know I don’t want to spend my time on there trying to be a perfect person for the benefit of strangers who couldn’t care less.