Is Social Media Slowly Destroying Our Lives?

Is social media killing our interpersonal skills? Our flesh and blood lives? Are we spending too much time on the virtual rather than the real? 

It seems more and more of my friends are making decisions to leave Social Media (SM), or at the very least, put it waaaay in the background of their lives. As a writer, and a published writer trying to sell books, it’s hardly an option for me to leave altogether. Or is that a lie I’m telling myself? If I were to leave it, would my sales suffer or remain the same? So I ask myself: What am I getting out of SM and is it worth it to stick around?

By the very nature of the term--Social Media—it seems just that, a place to socialize, which is fine. New ones are popping up, like MeWe, but from all accounts, that is very “social” and perhaps just another time-suck void, a place to "pick up" someone. I'm not interested in that.

And what of those of us who use a penname of sorts, completely separate life from our non-virtual world, filled with a completely different set of friends and acquaintances, another universe entirely? Where do we draw the line? If SM means to use “media” to be “social,” where do we distinguish our “real” lives from the ones in cyberspace? How “real” is this virtual world and are we living in a place that doesn’t really exist? Are we creating a fantasy existence we simply don’t have in the outside, flesh and blood world, living our lives here, as if in a dream we can create? Do the lonely need social media the most? Lost in the real world? Unfulfilled?

We sure do get caught up in it. We spend an inordinate amount of time here, scrolling, liking, commenting, posting…only to look up at the time and think: Well, where the hell did THAT go? People run the gamut from falling in love to backstabbing on the daily.

It’s like living in a video game I think somedays, where we feel more alive and real 'there' than 'here.' My circle of friends are primarily writers (and of course readers—I hope—or this whole thing becomes Theatre of the Absurd). Is that why we like it here so much? Because we are creating, the very fiber of what being a writer is? Are we, then, writing our own stories in essence? Maybe the story we want to have? Isn’t that what a writer does? Write stories?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’m asking them. I’m watching it destroy people while lift and free others. Where do I fit in? Is it slowly killing me or is it helping me to live a life of creative freedom, one I may not have otherwise? Or is it like any addiction where we ask the same questions: Is it affecting my real life? Is it ruining parts of my life? Am I ignoring things that should not and cannot be ignored?

But then without it, addiction or otherwise, I would ask: Is this the place I NEED to spend time to write, to create, to live out fantasies? Is that just the curse of being a creative being and that this modern-day venue, almost a romantic throwback to a time of love letters and waiting for the touch of someone while basking in it at the same time, is actually a gift to stay alive? There is something so paradoxical about it, isn’t it? It’s so modern and so evasive but is it really any different than old—school paper and pen? Our letters we write to the world? Is social media really just that for writers? Our journals? Our stories? Our poems? Us?

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I guess I must really answer these things, for me, personally, and through the lens of my existence as a writer. But I will end with this. Either we want to share our work as writers or we don’t. It’s really that simple. If we want to write for only ourselves, there is absolutely no reason to stay on social media. None, except to be "social." And I fear too many writers are using it for only that. But even as I write that, I almost disagree and could argue that social media has made writers of us all…for every post we write is a form of just that, writing. We are human. We want to be heard. But is our quest of wanting to be “liked” slowly destroying our humanity, our true capabilities to love one another? Is it a false love? A façade? A meaningless void of nothingness?

I’ve said it before: I write. Therefore I am. If I cease to write for others, will I, myself, cease to exist? I will exist just as sure as I'm watching the clouds scroll across the sky right the way I'm scrolling my words to you right now. But I think I'd be dead.