While responding to feedback from my recent post on my love/hate relationship with social media, I noticed a common theme arising for me around these conversations. What is enough and how do we accept it when we reach it?
Part of what makes social media such an addiction is our quest to collect “likes”. We post things that we think are clever, funny, scary, or offensive. We post things that we think will make it seem like our lives are really great or that we hope will generate sympathy. With any of these different kinds of posts, our ultimate goal is collecting as many likes as possible. We post, we leave, and we come back…to check and see how many likes we’ve gotten so far. And when there aren’t enough, we feel a little down. But when we come back and there are more likes than expected, we get a nice little jolt of “feels good”. Yay! We’re going viral! But that only lasts until we refresh and the cycle begins again. We’re better off to wait for a while, so the chances of more likes goes up, but we can’t help ourselves, so we refresh constantly.
Here in the United States, our entire culture is based on more. Our economy must always be expanding. Our personal wealth must always be growing. The bottom line must always increase, month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year. Even an increase that is less than expected can be considered a decrease. But how much expansion, growth, or increase is enough? I have no idea. But perhaps if we can figure that out for ourselves, we can loosen the grip on some of our addictions, like the ones we have with social media.
If a handful of truly authentic friendships are enough to fulfill our need to connect with others, then perhaps our need for validation through collecting likes on social media can begin to subside. If our personal real life network can provide support when we need help, then perhaps our need to broadcast every unfortunate detail of our lives for sympathy will lessen. If we can get back to actively cultivating relationships with face-to-face conversations, rather than passively engaging through an endlessly scrolling feed that has been designed to keep us scrolling, then perhaps we’ll get enough information and fulfillment to keep our brains occupied for a while. And we won’t need to continuously go back to the feeds, hoping for something new and interesting.
Now that we basically have unlimited access to anything we want whenever we want it, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we really need it. Or more importantly, what is enough?