Social media and various apps have tremendous addictive potential because people cannot stop receiving imaginary approval or consume an endless amount of unnecessary information, thus shortening life. Many people spend too much time on their phones, especially on specific apps, such as Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, when they could be doing something much more productive. Consequently, in order to not spend the whole life looking in hand, it is necessary to wake and live in a real, not a virtual world, using the phone only for truly necessary reasons.
Social networks, as mentioned earlier, make people addicted and have a significant risk of subjection. There are several reasons for it, one of which is the effect on the brain’s pleasure centers (Anderson and Rainie, 2018). In particular, on Instagram, the person receives enjoyable emotions from approval marks; as a result, he or she has a desire to publish and receive a new positive response endlessly. A human can spend hours updating the feed in order to see new likes under the publication. In this case, if you are so hungry for people’s approval, don’t post your brand-new snickers on Instagram – just ask your mom and you will be rewarded by the most precious “like” in your life. If you are lucky enough, your mom “reposts” to your grandma and you will be drowning in the sea of love and approval. Thus, why seek love from random strangers? If you find the basis for the brain’s pleasure centers in truly useful things, for example, in the pages for learning a new language, time will no longer be wasted.
Posts in social media frequently have the highest degree of bias, which in turn is reflected in the low degree of accuracy of online portraits of people. Instagram creates life in miniature, and frequently, the owners of accounts themselves cannot define where the reality is and where the fiction of their online portraits is. The business person on Instagram is frequently a 15-years-old geek playing video games and missing classes. Realizing that there is no need to strive for an equally perfect picture in a profile because each person is unique, it is possible to escape this addiction.
Working in the mode of a constant flow of information and replacing each other emotional impressions, the brain gets extremely tired. Not surprisingly that the hallmark of our generation is the ability to get tired of doing nothing. Without having time to fully open your eyes, you are already inserting the phone and looking at the tape with a stream of meaningless information, don’t you? Your emotions do not receive development in response to incoming feelings since it requires time and peace, which are absent in the conditions of convulsive assimilation of information (Anderson and Rainie, 2018). Besides, all this online chatting makes you change the masks all the time; while at a late party and receiving a message from your sad friend, just by switching from one chat to another, you can turn from a party animal into an empathic and supportive friend. However, in a hurry to be heard by people on the Internet, you lose precious communication minutes with the closest people in the real world, with whom much more time should be spent.
To summarize, in order to prevent useless spending time with the phone, which shortens life, it is necessary to live in the real, not in the virtual world, using apps for more productive reasons. It is needed to find the basis for the brain’s pleasure centers in truly useful things, and devote more time to the family. In addition, every life is exceptional and exciting, and there is no need to make it supposedly ideal on a social network. Awareness of all of it will allow empowering apps and social media to shorten life.
Work Cited
Anderson, Janna, and Rainie, Lee. “Stories from Experts about the Impact of Digital Life.”Pew Research Center, 2018. Web.