Within news, advice, and random celebrity content lies empty information. Yet, it is captivating and addictive. Social media is saturated with any topic that’s desirable. The comments go nowhere, and the opinions flood your mind space. Is there value in content and comments that dead-end?
The social media habitat is an automatic, rapid fire of information, creating a dopamine addiction loop that floods the system with stress hormones, opposing a flow state that contains calming hormones and deep concentration, which is necessary to evolve, create, develop, and reflect. Like rummaging through a garbage can for something valuable, the negative or barren information compounds upon the viewers, creating a corresponding algorithm in their minds. We then participate on this level—in a hood of limitations—instead of in conversations and thoughts that are aligned to elevate us.
Do you like being told not only what to buy, but what to think? And that is just the surface. Functioning as an addiction, social media is not just selling products; it is trading your thought process. Thoughts are sought after to be replaced. Once you are informed, is it changing anything? Are you making the bad go away by knowing? Is it making the world better? With this sneaky push to contaminate minds, thoughts must carry something special even amongst a poverty of meaning.
It is like a friend telling you tales all day and night. This happened, and that happened. A murder happened, that child was abducted, the car was in an accident, this train collided with a truck, that relationship is dead, the relationship needs this. Eat this, not that; exercise this way, not that way; do this to your face, not that. The wars and fires, the damage and devastation, the problems you cannot solve, the potential for immediate danger, and so on. Is this a friend you would like to continually hear from? Are their messages benefiting you? Is this chatter going to better the world? Better your world? Or is it confusing and keeping you tethered?
Numerous studies have shown the benefits of meditation, prayer, quiet, and chanting. If there are positive and beneficial outcomes, which have quite the opposite function of social media consumption, what are we connecting to?
In mindfulness (besides the biological benefits), there is meaning and depth, love, joy, compassion, gratitude, and more. Conversely, the speed and content of social media is a desolate, fillable space within dark alleys giving away power, taking away autonomy, where external messages matter, tricking you into the notion that yours do not.
The mind is not just a sensory system. Humans possess higher faculties such as imagination, curiosity, and intuition, which rely on an attuned mind, a mind that recognizes these facets and applies them. When we scroll and read comments, flip through headlines, or when an interesting face shares an opinion, a senseless trick, or another recycled thought, we are not accessing such faculties. We are kept in a dirty, mentally impoverished, messy, low-energy environment. The value is your mind, and the tool is your thoughts. So, through the chaos of social media and comments that consume your mind, you are diverted and unable to reach heights that we may not yet be aware of.
Awareness and thoughtfulness cannot excel or improve while consuming impoverished information. When apps are doing the thinking for you, the suggestions train us to look outside the self, especially for validation, instruction, information, and almost everything. And we wonder why the world isn’t better or healed? There is no progress in peace when we do not look within. Mental constriction is impeding us when we need to stretch our minds. Have we really tried? We try religions and academics, we try government and policy, we try the court of law and enforcement, but have we been given the chance to try ourselves?
Spiritual leaders sought solitude. Jesus, besides the 40 days and nights, frequently spent time in solitude. Buddha spent 49 days under the Bodhi tree and six years of solitary wandering and searching. He noted that solitude was essential for avoiding negative thoughts. And you cannot go to the toilet without your head down and shoulders hunched over a phone checking someone else’s comment or picture, or a news headline that can be contradicted on a different page? I know we are not all spiritual leaders. However, we are responsible as our own private spiritual leader, and nature, solitude, and quiet are necessary for development. Who knows what is possible if we try?
Social media, with its views from millions of people, is like a shrine in our hands; we gather and worship talk from strangers, inseparable from a device that we accept as reality. We run into plot lines in stories where the ending is replaced with another fragmented story, where we stumble over each line, and the main character is not even you. Your mind is not meant for alleyways and destitution, but expansiveness and richness. Through this awareness, we will heal and remember, elevating ourselves and the world.
