The problem with social media.

As I alluded to in my previous post, I think the biggest challenge facing businesses today in the wake of COVID-19 is social media. But it’s not only challenging businesses, it’s challenging the mental health of every individual who uses it. 

So, what’s the problem social media? 

Put simply, social media creates a false narrative as to the way people lives their lives. 

Take a quick scroll through any social media platform and you’ll see the great stuff that’s going on in people's lives and it’s fabulous that people sharing the great stuff that’s going on in their lives, but the problem is ultimately what people are not sharing. 

Let’s start on LinkedIn. A quick scroll down your newsfeed and you’ll find at least one person who has recently been promoted, landed a great new job or is working from a very swanky looking office or location. What people don’t post is a day-to-day grind, nobody posts about the days where they get a piece of work dropped on them last minute and they don’t leave the office until 8pm or the day when their probation period got extended because they haven’t hit their targets; nobody post about those days. 

Then you’ve got Facebook, which is ironically probably the most real platform out of the mainstream platforms that exist in 2022, but Facebook is still lined with people sharing their glossed-up good new stories. However, there are some people that are super negative on Facebook but generally they do this in a very uneducated, micro-issue manner which often leads their audience to question ‘why are they sharing their shit with the world on social media?’. 

And then is Instagram, which is arguably the most damaging as people constantly post themselves in fancy new clothes, posh bars, restaurants, and on amazing holidays. But what people don’t share is often struggle is behind the post. What people tend to forget is the reason that the person posting is sitting in a fancy bar or on amazing holiday is because they’ve worked for it, they’ve saved up, they’ve gone without at times when you're out having an amazing time, but people don’t share that part of the journey as people only want to show you the glitz and glamour of their life, which is fair enough. 

I don’t actually think the problem is that people are not sharing the bad news on social media. I actually think the problem is the amount time that people are spending on social media just scrolling through their feed, consuming posts. All people do on social media is compare everybody else’s life with their own, when often it's not a simple comparison as the post is normally not reality of that person's life. Often the person viewing a post has a much better and fulfilled life than the person posting but the person viewing just can’t comprehend that the photo or the short video that has been posted on social media may not paint the whole picture of what’s actually going on in that person's life. When you’re scrolling through social media you have this tendency to think that everything you see is happening exactly when it’s posted, when actually a lot of posts get recycled and are shared at a later date. 

Why is this a challenge for businesses?

It’s a challenge for businesses as so many people are pushing the work-life balance piece, which is just giving people unrealistic expectations of what to expect from their world of work. People have the mindset that they don’t have to do a lot to get paid really well and that work-life balance is where their employer has to keep paying them to do less than they were doing before to protect their mental well-being. We’ll, no it simply doesn’t work like that. That’s just called being lazy and entitled.

It doesn’t help when you’ve got enterprising businesses doing recruitment promo videos of ‘a day in the life of an employee’ within their business and within a 10-minute video the employee probably sits at the desk for about a combined total of about 15 seconds and spends most of the day doing workshops like art activities or socialising with their friends. I get these videos are meant to hook people in, but they’re hooking people into a false reality, which is ultimately causing staff to leave.

So, what I think people should do? 

I think people should unplug a little bit from social media. Have deeper, more meaningful conversations with people by being more present. It's amazing how much more you get out of a conversation by putting your phone out of sight and fully engaging in a conversation. Ironically, it's also amazing how quickly you get annoyed with someone if you put your phone away, fully engage in a conversation with someone and they don't reciprocate the engagement in the conversation and keep checking their phone throughout the conversation. 

I’m not saying that social media is completely bad, I love it, but what I’m saying is that when you’re on social media sometimes you need to question if what you see is the reality of what’s going on in the world or in that person's life at that time. I think today it's rare to find a person that really connects on a deeper level with more than one person, which is normally their other half, which is fine if you're truly happy with that, but most people crave a slightly wider support circle than that. When I say support circle, I don't mean your friends who you socialise with, I mean people who you can trustfully open up to without fear of judgement or stigma. 

So just try it, turn your phone off, put it away, don't think about it and be present; trust me it's liberating.