Not to start another opinion article with a social media-related grievance, but I was overwhelmed within five minutes of opening Instagram today. The latest sources of destruction in America met me as soon as I turned on my phone, and while they’re all things that I claim to care about, they flew past my eyes at lightning speed as I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. I read about deeply distressing things and felt the impact of desensitization as I barely started to digest them before moving on. Everything felt far too fast and far too overwhelming to face.
The short-form, continual, looping nature of social media algorithms is designed to keep us scrolling until our eyes glaze over. If a post fails to rapidly hit us with dopamine, we mindlessly scroll to the next one. In doing so, we risk becoming apathetic to everything we see. It’s hard to feel the full impact of someone’s words or actions when we only have to brush one finger against a screen to move on from it entirely. Social media can connect us to current events and human stories, but it can also keep us in a state of detachment from almost everything that we hear.
On the occasions where the weight of everything that we’re seeing hits us with full force, in the moments where we hear a new perspective and are pushed into a state of wanting to help, we’ve seen so much that it may feel impossible to know where to begin. Where are we supposed to put our energy and time when we don’t have enough of either of them to apply ourselves to every single crisis we hear about?
I wish that there were a simple solution, but life doesn’t seem to have many of those for us. That being said, I have learned some things in my search for an answer that may be helpful. I don’t think that the solution is to delete social media entirely. Social media can be a helpful tool in sharing things like perspectives that aren’t always given a voice on the major news networks in this country. The problem seems to arise when we choose passive consumption over actually engaging with the information.
Intentional usage is key. If you see something that you’d like to learn more about, practice breaking out of your scrolling cycle and look into it. Spend more than 60 seconds feeling the emotional impact of a current social issue. Look for recommendations for ways to contribute to issues that you care about, or look for an organization to join. Emphasize the “social” part of social media and use it to connect with people and launch real-life conversations. We need to actively engage with what we’re seeing if we want it to make any sort of useful impact on our lives.
There’s also definitely something to be said for limiting the amount of time that you spend online (something that I’m trying to do better with). At some point, the sheer amount of content will become overwhelming, no matter how you engage with it. Commit to logging off social media at certain times of your day or week and use that time to clear your mind. Spend in-person time with the people around you and look for ways to be a good friend or neighbor. The things on the internet that seem looming and distant are often not as far removed from our surroundings as they may seem.
When it feels like there are too many problems to tackle, something that helps me is remembering that no social issue stands on its own. Interconnectedness is something that many prominent social activists have emphasized. To name a couple, Angela Davis emphasized the need to recognize the roles of race and class in women’s lives when discussing feminism in her book “Women, Race & Class.” Winona LaDuke is an Indigenous activist who has spoken about the interrelations between Indigenous land rights and environmentalism.
Try putting your energy into one thing that grieves you, and you’ll likely find that you’re impacting more than just one systemic problem. The world will always be overwhelming, but there are ways to face it beyond shutting down. Take an active role in how you learn and what you do about it.
