A newly discovered problem with social media...

Is being connected actually making us too connected?

I’m one of those people who’s been examining my relationship with social media pretty heavily in recent days and there’s one thing that I noticed happening that I have yet to see mentioned anywhere.

I seem to be too connected to my friends.

You might be asking yourself, why is that a problem? What’s wrong with knowing what’s going on with your friends? Doesn’t having a lot of friends heal the lonely child in you who wasn’t cool growing up?

Yes, I love my friends, but my response is that, by following them on socials, I passively know too much about them, and that this is taking up too much space in my brain that could be used for other things.

Just the other day, while browsing my Instagram stories. I noticed something that a particular friend of mine does that I really dislike. It’s not a big deal in any way — I had actually forgotten about it. She’s not really hurting anyone by doing it, so I don’t feel a need to confront it if she’s enjoying herself, yet it rubs me just enough the wrong way that I was annoyed to be reminded of it.

Remembering this took up a lot of space in my brain, which I then had to vent out of me. It didn’t seem like a big thing, but… I started to realize how much of my brainspace is used thinking about my friends in unproductive ways.

I think… I just know too much about everyone. When people share everything about themselves, that might even include the things we don’t like about them. It’s good to know who you’re friends with, but if you have even 50 active friends on your socials that you hear about every day, that 50 slots of your brainspace being taken up by knowing what’s going on with those people (and most people actively follow a lot more than 50 accounts). Isn’t that a lot too much time thinking about our friends (or family or artists or companies, or whoever you follow online)?

It’s normal to have things you don’t like about your friends, but back in the day, these things weren’t in our faces all the time. I wasn’t constantly thinking about how to help my struggling friends, while neglecting my own needs. I wasn’t constantly stewing on the annoying things about people that, before socials, I might have never known about them because it wouldn’t have come up in our discussions. I wasn’t constantly thinking about ways to save the world that I know I would never have the capacity to implement. I wasn’t constantly watching cute animal videos.

If I compare life now to life back in the day, some 20-odd years ago before I was on social media, if I wanted to catch up with a friend, I’d call them up to hang out. In that time, we’d talk and catch-up on what’s new and relevant and interesting in our lives. We’d leave out the uninteresting this-and-that, focusing on what was the most important to us.

Nowadays, I know what most of my friends are up to and what’s important to them, because I follow them on socials. This leads to conversations IRL just being… different. I end up having the same conversations with all of my friends, which are conversations based on what are usually shared values. While I still definitely get something out of these talks, I find that I’m getting bored of them, because even though all of my friends are interesting, there can only be so many shared viewpoints on a subject before it gets to be a tiring subject to discuss altogether.

Let’s have a look at one of my friends as an example. Helena Haaparanta is someone that I absolutely adore. She’s amazing: smart and clever, wildly talented, totally gorgeous inside and out… the whole package! I admire everything about her. I follow her diligently because she’s so friggin’ cool that I always want to know what’s going on with her.

Now, I only see her once every couple of months because, as an active professional artist, she’s very busy and can’t get out here to hang out as often as we’d all like. However, fortunately, we’re still getting to know one another, so when she does come out for an afternoon, we have great talks. But I will say, the reason our talks are great is because we have only been acquainted for about a year and a half, so we have lots to learn about one another still.

I miss having these get-to-know-my-friends talks with people. As a storyteller, I love telling life stories, but I also love hearing them. Experiencing life to its fullest, both good and bad, is what living is all about, as far as I’m concerned, and since I can only experience so much as one person, I adore hearing other people’s stories, because it helps me live vicariously through them and I can add their new perspectives from people I trust to my own pool of experience by proxy. It invokes a similar feeling to this quote from George R.R. Martin’s “A Dance with Dragons”:

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” said Jojen. “The man who never reads lives only one.”

Just change that to “A listener lives a thousand lives,” and “The one who never listens lives only one.” It’s the same principle and it’s the reason I love telling and hearing stories.

Yet, I still find myself wishing, when Helena visits, that she was telling me all about her experiences as the vocalist for the now-concluded winter circus. We went to see the event early on, but I’m dying to hear tales about it from her own lips! I want to hear her tell me about this totally new thing she participated in, what funny stories she has from behind the scenes, and if she’ll be doing similar things in the future.

Okay, yes, I know that also sounds like I want to do an interview with her, and I totally do, but I also want to hear the off-the-record version from my friend, not just the professional take from a professional artist.

I feel like social media has robbed me of these conversations and stories, all while reminding me of every single detail about my friends that I don’t necessarily need to know. I’ve recently made changes to how I use my socials — as you can see, I’m posting more on Substack now, for example! — in order to try to encourage me to interact with my friends more 1-on-1 than online, to have more conversations in chats than on socials, and that sort of thing. I took my personal contacts off Facebook years ago for the same reason, but Instagram has filled in the gap too much now. Now that I’m totally gone from Facebook, I hope to keep adjusting the way I use Instagram to make it more centered around my writing and less focused on me as a whole. Perhaps everyone who follows me has gotten the point, that I don’t need to keep shouting my identity out there. There’s enough. Perhaps I should actually promote my books a little more over there instead… something to ponder.

Anyways, I’m trying to keep this a space that’s more free-form train-of-thought than my more heavily edited blog essays, so I’m not going to think too much on this; rather, I’ll just share it and if anyone made it this far through, tell me if you’ve experienced a similar info overload because of socials!