Social Media Jealousy

Hello. Welcome to Daily(ish) episode number 257 for July 16. My name is Chris, and this episode is brought to you by, Patreon supporters. Patreon.com/ichris is where you can check out how you can support the podcasting efforts I do here as well as those of Kyle and myself and others at goodstuff.fm. I just hit record because I had some thoughts, and, so there's a bit of a slightly it'll be slightly edited, but a stream of consciousness thoughts on some social media stuffs that I'm processing and trying to think through and and figure out how best to handle it for myself and also some thoughts on just society, culture.

I don't know. I worry about folks like me prognosticating about the society at large when it really the most important part is just thinking about how it affects me, my family, my friends, you know, my circle of small circle of influence. But, anyways, here it goes. What I'm starting to worry about is the way social media apps, like say Instagram in particular, it was, started under the pretense kind of like you would share photos of things of the lake you're looking at. It was like for photographers to share photos and socially, and you would share them with friends or people on the Internet you'd never met who followed you and thought you were a great photographer.

And now that more, what should like muggles or the average people are on there, and it's not photographers necessarily, it's not just nerds, but just the general population is on there. It feels more like it's becoming and has become a place to tell people and enlighten them about what you have, what you have done, what you're doing, what your kids have done, what your kids are doing, and not just in a social status update of social media status update of, like, hey, we're headed to the Ball Diamond to watch a game tonight, but more of a here's this thing we did. And by virtue of the fact that you weren't there, it kind of makes it feel like you missed out and you aren't it's that whole high school peer pressure keep up with the Joneses kind of thing in a weird kind of way. And I've like this this isn't anything new that nobody's ever thought about social media before and its effect on people. And maybe I think what's sort of striking me to me now, what's striking to me about it now is how not so much that the muggles or normal folks are getting on Instagram, but it's more that locally I'm seeing a lot more people on there, friends and family who years ago didn't get it and wouldn't use it and didn't think it was worth their time to do it and now all of a sudden are.

And that feeling of like when it was my friend Jesse in San Francisco sharing photos of a band he went to, it was like that's an it's kinda like that was another world, and and I just got to get a glimpse into that. Or Caroline shares photos of her trip to Japan or something like that. Like, that's that's a place where, yeah, I'd like to go and it would be fun, but I don't feel like I'm missing out and I don't feel like somehow my life is worth less than it did before I saw those photos. But when it's people locally doing stuff, maybe it's their kids doing stuff or them doing stuff with their kids or for their kids, it starts to creep into this like yucky feeling of, like, my reaction to it. And I think I'm especially susceptible to it.

I have, I'm easily, what's the word of, like I'm easily jealous. I'm easily made jealous. I don't know what the action there is, but I've I succumb to jealousy, I guess, easily. I know that's a and and or bitterness, and so that's a thing that I struggle with. And I try to eliminate, those areas of my life that I where I struggle with it just so that I'm not to not better myself, like I want to try and overcome these that struggle, but also throwing it in my face every day to like make me struggle with it is not really a healthy way to to deal with it either.

Now I find myself sort of caught in this catch 22 of like being upset or bitter or whatever for no good reason at at friends or family. And then but not wanting to like unfollow said friends or family because then that seems rude. And so you're in this weird social thing, which on Twitter is solved. I've solved that sometimes by if I'm, you know, feeling bothered by or easily angered by something somebody is tweeting about, well, I just mute them for a week or day or or a month or or forever and you keep following them. But somehow unfollowing someone on Instagram, like, it feels like I have to go nuclear where I just either unfollow everybody and just become this account that shouts stuff at the world or delete my account or something like that.

And I often have this. I think I've talked about this before on Daily(ish) where I get into into like some neat little social network, an app or or sites or whatever tool, technology tool, and I think it's really cool. And then I try and convince folks around me to use it. They don't really uptake on it or whatever. They they might some of them might, some of might not, and whatever.

And then time goes by and all of a sudden everybody is using this thing. And not because not that I'm so great at discovering this stuff. Not everybody has time to sit around checking out new technology and and keeping up with it. But once everybody else starts using, all of a sudden, I see these all the the side effects and the detrimental aspects of said thing on the culture around me, and it can disgust me. And then I wanna, like, go back and, like, grab everybody's phones and be like, hey.

No. No. Let's just put all this stuff away. Put it back or pretend you didn't see it. Let's go back to the way it was before.

And it's something that I often we have we're dealing with with our so our kids, like, playing a video game like a Fortnite, like I've talked about before too. And you expose them to it because like, hey, this is fun. Your friend's doing it. That's great. That's fun.

And then all of a sudden becomes the thing that they have to do above all else and life cannot exist without said thing. And and you need to try and put that genie back in the bottle or the video game back on the shelf or delete the Xbox from the shelf. And that's a hard thing to do to a kid and even for an adult. It's hard to give up some of those things. And I think there's honestly a quite a a great reckoning maybe is overstating it a bit, but, because I know Android phones have had this variations on this that you could install for a while yourself.

But, in iOS 12, the next version of the Apple's operating system for their phones and and iPads is a screen time, setting or our reports and or both. You can there's a setting for it where you can adjust how often you think you want to have access to a certain app or a certain category of apps. So like social media can have an hour a day, let's say, it'll warn you and then shut you out of those apps once an hour is done. But also reports where it shows you how much time you spent today and the last seven days within apps. And you can also then you'll be able to configure that for your kids and and get reports and and set limits on what your kids can use on their iOS devices.

But I think for the average user, it's going to be kind of awakening to realize how much time they're actually spending on these devices and particularly the apps on this devices that they're they're using it for. Because it can be as something as innocent as you have in text messaging where you're legitimately communicating with one or a few other humans directly. And but when you see the sum total of that as being like four hours of your day is spent actually typing into a phone, I would hope that that causes a bit of like, oh, man, maybe I we should rethink some of the usage of these things. I'm worried that it won't matter because people will just say that's what the way it is because I know that's my often my response to some of these things. But just even with my own usage, I I set a limit of, like, half an hour on this one game Clash Royale that I I find myself playing in often.

If I'm putting the kids to bed or whatever is what I play or if I'm just needing a little bit of a coffee break or mental break from what I'm doing, I play a quick game. It's like three to five minutes long game. Throughout a course of a twenty four hour window, obviously, when I'm not when I'm sleeping, I'm not playing it. But, like, you know, it's some days I blow through that half hour in early afternoon, and some days I don't even come close to playing it for half an hour in a day. But even still, like, that's a half hour of my whole day that I'm playing this fairly stupid little game, that if I just delete the app, goes away and I've all my air quotes achievements are gone.

And, so I think I hope, that whatever amount of data gets surfaced for individuals, and I'm gonna do the best on my YouTube channel and and stuff to sort of promote folks being aware of this at least. I hope that that does help affect folks, awareness of how much time they're spending on devices and not that I think it can't be like, if you're reading a book on your phone versus reading a book on a book, then that's great. But if you're like getting sucked into arguments and negativity and and fights for things out there that aren't even anywhere near you because of social media, because of articles other people have shared, you're getting mad at somebody because they shared a thing about a thing and you don't like that thing, or because of some tweet they had or because of the photo they shared of their kids doing something stupid on Instagram, that you it helps folks sort of recognize some of this, how much time we're spending on this stuff. And I'm as, like, addicted to and enjoying doing stuff on a computer, creating and building and writing and editing and all that kind of stuff on a computer as the next person, like, way more so.

And but it's a lot of the, like for me, it's a lot of the, like, phone specific stuff because that's like a shutting out the folks literally right around you kind of attitude and way of living that I think is we're just on like, my generation, 30 generation, age are straddling the the era where we had we only had computers that were somewhere in the in the house. Like, they had you had to go use a desktop to be away from everybody and and sort of sucked into the Internet that way. Whereas now with everybody growing people growing up with phones being the way you connect to the Internet, it does cause some concern about what kind of world we are creating as humans. And, I don't know. I don't have any further thoughts there, but I'm circling back to what I started with.

I, the social dilemma has leads me towards, like, the nuclear option of just, like, unfollowing everybody, at least for the summer or for the rest of the summer or until Christmas or some time period. And then, you know, evaluate. That's kind of what I found to be healthy healthiest when, evaluating social media is just like cut that thing out of your life for a while and see how much you miss it or how much it really affects you and and then evaluate evaluate what you need to go back to. Hopefully, you don't realize that you're listening to a podcast way too often and stop listening to them. But that could be very well be something else that you need to evaluate in your life.

But not before you leave, five star review for Daily(ish) on the app store of your podcast store of your choice, please. And, tweet about it to all your friends and show share Facebook messages and Instagram posts about how much you love listening to good stuff shows and Daily in particular, obviously. But I digress. Hope this episode finds you well wherever you are in some warmth in summer and enjoying a tasty beverage of your choosing, and you're not being forced to have a tasty beverage. Okay.

Thank you for listening. I'm iChris on Twitter. If you're still doing the Twitter things, goodstuff.fm is where you can find all our podcasts. And, we're having lots of fun creating podcasts a little bit slower in the summer with things winding down for a few shows, but excited about what's coming back up in the fall and, still lots of stuff to listen to. Good stuff that I found.

Thanks for listening. Hope you have a good day. Bye.