“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse
Everyone was on their feet at the United Center.
The Chicago Bulls were pitted against Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the score was surprisingly close. We were seated at half-court, 6 rows off the floor. You could feel the heat coming up from below.
I did my very best to savor the moment. I absorbed the energy of the arena. Listened intently to the chatter on the bench. Stared in awe as arguably the second best basketball player ever performed the basketball equivalent of Beethoven’s 9th.
4th quarter. 18 seconds left. The score is tied. Lebron has the ball. The sheer size and speed of this man! He moves so smoothly for someone his size, gesticulating fervently to his teammates to get in position.
12 seconds left. His eyes dart up and down between the shot clock and the defender in front of him. A teammate sets a pick. Lebron makes his move. 6 seconds left. Lebron pulls up, releases the shot.
SWISH.
Cavaliers up two. 3.2 seconds left.
The bulls call a timeout, then promptly botch the inbounds play.
Cavaliers win.
I slumped in my seat as the final seconds ticked off. I was physically and emotionally drained. Experiencing nearly three hours of up close, back and forth basketball contested by the best players in the world had taken its toll.
To my immediate left, an eager son was showing his father the video he took of LeBron’s game winning shot. Directly behind me, a very inebriated fellow was taking a video and shouting something about a Facebook group. To my right, a teenage girl was in the process of snapping the final selfies of the night. She must have taken 20 photos.
In fact, everywhere I looked, people seemed to be more involved with their phones than the final seconds of the game.
People, do you understand what you just witnessed?
Social media is killing us
Ours is a selfish, status-driven, consumption-oriented culture. A culture obsessed with projecting wealth, fame and fortune, favoring winning at all costs. Scroll Instagram for five minutes to see this in action: lavish vacations, expensive cars, “successful” businesses and charming love stories. Beautiful people living beautiful lives.
This is no accident.
Savvy advertisers and “influencers” tell us what to buy by playing on our deepest emotions and desires. That we’ll never have enough because others will always have more.
Shrewd politicians tell us how we’re oppressed and victimized by the other side, rather than letting ideas stand on their own merit. Lively, respectful debate has been replaced with name-calling and virtue-signaling.
The mainstream media pits brother against sister through the manipulation of information to further political agendas. Independent creators and moderate newspeople are being suppressed in favor of polarizing click-bait meant to incense and radicalize, rather than inform and educate.
Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Snapchat. YouTube. These are massive (read: MASSIVE) corporations with billions of dollars on the line. Enormous entities that twist and tangle your mind to their own devious ends. So you’ll buy that new jacket. That new purse. So you’ll act the way they want you to act. Spend the way they want you to spend.
And think the way they want you to think.
“Ok Scott, take off your tinfoil hat. These are powerful tools for good! Never before has information been so readily available. Never before have we been able to communicate in such new and innovative ways. Never before have we seen such cultural acceleration.”
That’s all well and good. But it comes with too high a price.
Social media usage is STAGGERING, especially in young people. According to the Pew Research Center, among 18–24 year olds:
94% use YouTube
78% use Snapchat
71% use Instagram
68% use Facebook
45% use Twitter
Unsurprisingly, social media usage is inexorably tied to mental health, often with disastrous effects. In 2016, an estimated of 44.7 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States had a mental illness. Young adults aged 18–25 had the highest prevalence of any mental illness at 22.1% compared to adults aged 26–49 at 21.1% and aged 50 and older at 14.5%.
Another study looked at social media use and social isolation among U.S. young adults, ages 19–32. It assessed participants’ usage of 11 popular social media platforms. The study found that those who visited any platforms at least 58 times per week were three times more likely to feel socially isolated compared to those who used social media fewer than 9 times per week.
In other words, these young people see themselves as being socially isolated from their peers whether or not it’s actually true.
Rather than providing a platform for meaningful discourse, discussion and debate, social media cultivates depression, anger and division.
We are spectators in our own lives
There’s a Family Guy episode where the cable goes out in Quahog. Peter simulates the television experience by pulling a cardboard box over his head and proceeding to live his day to day life as if it were a hit TV show. It doesn’t end well.
Even though thousands of people gathered at the United Center to watch the game, many, like Peter, preferred an intermediary that filtered their experience. They weren’t watching Lebron’s game winning shot, they were watching their phone watch Lebron’s game winning shot.
They didn’t take in the moment for what it was, a chance to glimpse basketball greatness, but for what it could be: a means to brag to their friends and followers for the social clout they so desperately crave.
Social media is everywhere. The beach, the ballpark, the restaurant, the movies, hell I’ve even seen it at church. People are so fixated on demonstrating how pretty their lives are they forget to live them. I’m reminded of this quote from Catherine Reis:
“You only live once. Make sure you spend 15 hours on the internet daily, desperately seeking validation from strangers.”
The way forward is to go back
It’s ironic really.
We live in a time of unparalleled selfishness and egoism and yet, individualism seems to be lost. Replaced by a need to fit in with the larger collective. Differing opinions are shouted down, labeled as hate, or worse, censored by the very social media platforms who claim to serve them.
If you don’t think the way we think, talk the way we talk, we’ll cast you out. Label you. Take away your job and livelihood. Berate you until you’re nothing more than a shell of your former self who had the “good sense” to simply go away.
Honesty, loyalty and respect have been replaced by deceit, indifference and disregard. We teach our children the world should bend to them, rather than the other way around (I mean damn, we’ve even started punishing teachers who dare carry out any in-classroom discipline).
We must return to a simpler time, cliché as it may sound. A time where we looked forward to this weekend’s camping trip for more reasons than snapping the perfect photo. When we laid out under the stars and let our minds wander. When we breathed in fresh air and pondered our place in this wide universe.
“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is,” Jack Kerouac wrote.
We must learn to turn off the dizzying world around us, even for moments at a time. We must swap endless Instagram scrolling for nighttime journaling. Replace Tik Tok with picking up a book. Avoid your 50th YouTube video in favor of a board game. Anything that gets you away from a screen and closer to the real, tangible world.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. And make no mistake about it, it sounds crazy to wind the clock back now that social media and 21st century society have taken hold.
But, as Henry Miller reminded us, “We must do the ridiculous in order to touch the sublime.”
Be strong, be safe, be well.
Photo courtesy of Matthew Henry on Unsplash