10/15/2024
When I realized Facebook was becoming all consuming for many people (sometime in 2012), I saw all the red flags. As a teenager in the early 90s, fashion magazines had wrecked my self-image so I knew what comparison could do to youth mental health. I knew that Facebook would be 1000x worse. I started talking to my daughters about it (then 3 and 5 years old) because they were old enough to notice how many people were glued to their screens. It pained me to think that they would grow up thinking that was normal.
I managed to keep my kids off of social media until they were sophomores in high school and we had many conversations along the way about focus, preventative mental health, and the gift of being bored. We watched The Social Dilemma and I went from using social media for business, to stopping completely.
As predicted, social media is 1000x more damaging than fashion magazines. We are now in a youth mental health crisis with the Surgeon General calling for warning labels on social media. Yet, we still see train cars full of people with eyes glued to their phones, couples sitting in restaurants both looking at their phones rather than each other, and school halls during passing periods eerily quiet because nearly every student is walking with their eyes down on their phones.
The problem has not been solved. We are not just losing our youth to anxiety and depression, we are losing creativity, focus, and innovation. We are losing original thoughts. We are losing human connection and the human growth that it sparks. We are losing sleep, which leads to loss of productivity, creativity, clarity, and patience. All because of this tiny, yet powerful computer in our pockets and more specifically, social media.
LOOK is going to solve this problem. Please VOTE for LOOK here: https://www.tallyspace.com/652ac3edca223
