Sometime ago,  I wrote about my spending too. much time on social media, specifically Twitter. I decided that I was not going to do that anymore, and for a little while, that worked. I would log in to see if there was anything there worthy of responding to, but that was about it. For a while. I then found several people that I follow that were much more interesting to pursue dialogue with and of course that killed my experiment.  Hypocrite.  Well, here I am again, doing the same thing, limiting my time online simply because it is an addiction of sorts, even when I become involved with interesting people. I’ve really discovered that I actually don’t have much to say, and what I do have to say probably isn’t of much interest to anyone but me.

Twitter, and I guess Facebook, are the opioids of the Internet. Once a person begins to feel better about themselves, they can’t stop. Or just don’t want to stop. It’s a conundrum for everyone on social media. I used to work with several people that were on Facebook, all day, everyday. You can probably guess the level of productivity these people had at work. then, the employer didn’t seem to mind so much as long as, eventually, th work was completed. That’s what we see all the time, I believe: people more interested in keeping up with social media during the day than in anything else, to the extreme of even ignoring their families. And so yes, it is an actual addiction that all of us need to find a way to rehabilitate ourselves from. Unfortunately, there’s no Social Media Anonymous that any of us may join and be able to support one another in our attempt to leave it behind.  We have to do it all on our own, and hopefully, over time become less dependent being online, and return to life in the real world.

What it takes for me is to find something else to do. there’s always something to do around the house, and that makes it easier for me to stay away to the point where I have actually forgotten about Twitter for a few days at a time. When I do log in, I try, hard, to Ignore the Stupid. That’s tough to do because there’s so much of it out there that I am tempted to respond to everything I see in my time line.If people think they’re going to resolve world or social issues in tweets of 280 characters, they’re not only not ignoring the stupid, but are contributing to it directly. Guilty.

Maybe it’s not giving it up entirely that is the solution, but using it in moderation. Slowly, over time, spending less time on social media, and more time with real people – you know – friends, neighbors, and let’s not forget, family members. The least important part of our day should be the time we spend online. Nothing is ever solved there, and most people are less interested in the opinions of others than they are of their own. So it’s like shouting at a brick wall. How insane is that?