Dear Screen Time, thank you

Social media is wonderful, it keeps us in contact with faraway friends, allows us to share photos and memories with our loved ones and even in a small way feel part of our favourite celebrities day to day life.

But at what cost does it affect our OWN personal lives? This all came about after my phone very cruelly updated and presented with me a little something called screen time. Without volunteering myself to it, I one day got a notification informing me of my ‘screen time’ The statistics before my eyes shocked me. It breaks down how long you clock up on your phone, categories and how many times you pick up your phone during the day.

My average was over 4 hours and 30 minutes and the majority of that was social media. I know I spend a far amount of time on social media mainly twitter and Instagram. But to see the hours racked up in a week shocked me. With that much time I thought of all the productive things I could of done with my time. Instead I’d been aimlessly scrolling through twitter looking at tweets that didn’t stimulate my mind nor bring me anything worthy of my time.

I use social media to promote a website I run with my best friend where we both document our drag adventures aptly titled DragAdventures. Over the last year it’s gained a steady and strong following, we now have a talented team of contributors, we’ve worked press events and interviewed big name drag queens we never thought we could achieve. Of course social media plays a big part in gaining a following and promoting our articles live, before and after shows.

Besides that being the only productive and creative thing to come out of of social media usage, I think of the hours and what I could of done. I could of finished that book that has taken me months to read, I could be writing many more articles which I constantly put off.

Not to mention lately how it’s taken a toll mentally, it can be so draining to keep going back to something you know isn’t going to increase productivity. The amount of headaches I’ve gone to bed with after a marathon of scrolling has increased. As well as this, we see a lot of people affected by either comparing their regular life to social media lives, we have to remember how edited everything is.

So why do we dedicate so much time to scrolling through nonsensical nonsense? Do we have a fear of missing out? Worry that we’ll be behind on fandoms we get ourselves involved in? Miss out on what our fave celeb is up to? If it doesn’t enhance your day to day life and takes up so much time why are we so attracted to it. Well of course, it’s main factor is to get away from day to day dullness, to get involved in a place where we don’t have to think of the ever growing boring to do list; coursework, house work etc it’s a great way of putting it all off to refresh that page just one more time just in case.

Of course social media will never wither away, and I myself know I won’t come off it. But instead I have taken the challenge to half my time on social media. Make a list of objectives and goals to enhance day to day life instead of reaching for the phone to refresh twitter to see what people who I don’t really know tweet about well… nonsense.

Written for More Than A Millennial November 2018

#socialmedia #screentime #Iphone #Millennials