The world in my pocket

Scott Loftis

I used to enjoy social media.

A decade or more ago, it was a way to

keep up with friends, or catch up with old

classmates or former work colleagues. You could find someone you hadn’t talked to in 20 years and discover where life had taken them. You could see pictures of their kids and grandkids. You could keep up with people who had moved hundreds of miles away.

There were stupid jokes and funny pictures and birthday wishes from people you barely remembered knowing.

It was fun.

More and more lately, it’s become a source of anxiety and sadness.

I’m not sure exactly when that happened.

Maybe social media changed. Maybe I changed. Probably both.

Somewhere along the way, keeping up with people became secondary to being constantly bombarded with reasons to be angry.

Everybody is mad about something.

Politics, obviously. But it goes far beyond politics.

People are mad about schools. They’re mad about cops. They’re mad at the people who are mad about cops. They’re mad about what somebody said at a city council meeting. They’re mad because somebody put up a camera. They’re mad because somebody took down a camera. They’re mad about what somebody else posted on Facebook, which inevitably leads to another Facebook post explaining why the first Facebook post was wrong.

And everybody is absolutely certain they’re right.

That may be the part that bothers me most.

There doesn’t seem to be much room anymore for, “I don’t know.”

I say “I don’t know” fairly often. The older I get, the more comfortable I become saying it.

There are a handful of things I’m pretty certain about. There are a lot more things about which I have an opinion. And there are an enormous number of things about which I don’t know enough to have an intelligent opinion at all.

Social media doesn’t seem to encourage that kind of thinking.

Instead, every complicated issue must immediately be divided into two sides. Pick one. Defend it. Assume the worst about everybody who picked the other one.

Then keep scrolling.

And that’s the really strange part.

We keep scrolling.

We scroll past the political argument and the conspiracy theory and the horrible crime and the natural disaster and the war on the other side of the world.

Then we see somebody’s new puppy.

Then another argument.

Then somebody we went to high school with is on vacation.

Then somebody died.

Then an advertisement for shoes.

Then another reason the country is supposedly doomed.

That is an awfully strange collection of emotions to ask your brain to process in five minutes.

I don’t think human beings were designed for this.

For most of human history, people worried primarily about what was happening in their own lives and their own communities. That was plenty.

Now I can sit on my couch in Arkansas and, within a matter of minutes, become angry or frightened or saddened by 15 different things happening to people I have never met in places I have never been.

And then, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I keep scrolling to find No. 16.

I’m not ready to swear off social media. It still has value for me, both personally and professionally.

There are still people there I’m genuinely happy to hear from. There are still pictures that make me smile and stories that make me laugh. Every once in a while, I’ll hear from someone I haven’t talked to in years, and for a moment social media does exactly what made me enjoy it in the first place.

It connects me to someone.

Maybe the answer is simply to become more deliberate about how much of it I consume.

Because I’m beginning to realize there’s a difference between being informed about the world and carrying the weight of the entire world around in your pocket.

Social media once made my world feel bigger.

Lately, far too often, it just makes the world feel angrier and sadder.

And I’m not sure that’s a particularly healthy way to spend my time.

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Scott Loftis is editor and publisher of the Carroll County News. His email address is SLoftis@ CarrollCoNews.com.