- Words: 593
- Time to read: 3 minutes
It’s easy to allow the busy work to take up our time. It’s fun. It’s useful insomuch as it proffers a sense of doing and if you’re really desperate, a sense of being. It’s busy work because it takes work—mental, emotional, and certainly physical—to maintain the mirage of influence and interaction.
But it undermines both our purpose and ability. God has given us an incredible gift in the brain. Our disuse—or rather, misuse—of it is to simply fall into the proxy of what our world and society have become today. Useful distraction. Ambivalent connection. Insipid experience.
We’ve fallen prey to the lie that somehow social connection is measured in interaction online or in the number of friends we have when in reality we know very few of these algorithmic anomalies intimately. We’ve come to believe that viral content is the hallmark of acceptance and the ultimate endgame.
But to what end?
Social media is a marketing scheme packaged in the affable shell of human connection. There may be much connecting. There’s very little that’s human about it.
I remember scrolling through my Facebook page’s promoted content a while back. I don’t remember how long I scrolled before finding a post from someone I personally knew and that was directly helpful without an angle to get me to sign up, buy, or buy into what was being pushed.
Make no mistake—managing social media is busy work.
You may be able to make a fine living from it—there’s certainly enough of an allure from it—but it’s not meaningful work. Sell one more widget. Or 10 more. For that logic, why not a million?
There’s always more. There’s always FOMO. There’s always someone just a little better, faster, and smarter.
When the fog of delusion that is social media finally lifts it usually leaves us in a stupor, searching for anything to tap, scroll, or to which to react. And we find the innocuousness of these “relationships” to be so mundane that we are left craving for something real.
Or…
We bring in the busy work into the true relationships we feebly possess and only to them distasteful when contrasted with the dopaminergic savor that is TikTok, Facebook, X, or your addiction of choice.
The addiction to the software is not a bug—it’s a feature. Every stimulus is evoked in order to keep us scrolling and busy caring about things, causes, and even people who have no bearing on our lives. But we permit the tyranny of third-party control when we are swept up in the busy world of nothingness.
I am not necessarily advocating for excluding social media completely from our lives. I am questioning our ability to control our use, invested interest, and response to it. I am not necessarily suggesting that all things social media are bad. I’m sure there are millions of successful use cases. If the social media experiment over the last 20 years has shown us anything it’s that market research is powerful, the enticement for immediate gratification is formidable, and our capacity to resist what social media has become is exponentially weaker as the machine learning and AI become more and more advanced.
Don’t fall into the busy work of maintaining appearances for appearances’ sake. And don’t succumb to the easy vices of social media. They only grow stronger, more advanced, and frustratingly more gratifying. But it’s smoke and mirrors. Ultimately, there is more media than social, no matter how vociferous the influencers may be or how engaging their content becomes.