That’s What Sarah Said
Sarah Said
The millennial generation is practically synonymous with technology, social media and smart phones.
Just walk in a mall or step foot on a college campus, and you’ll probably run into someone from Generation Y because their heads are down focused on their iPhones.
However, evidence says millennials are not the most addicted to social media.
It’s their parents.
The New York Times published an article detailing a Nielsen report released Jan. 17, 2017, which found that Generation X is more addicted to social media than those 18-34 years old.
It was found that 35-49 years olds spend an average of six hours and 58 minutes on social media a week, while those who are 18-34 only spend six hours and 19 minutes a week on social media.
Our parents and our bosses are the ones who are just as addicted to social media and the internet as we are.
But beyond the fact that Generation X spends more time on social media than millennials, the thought that almost an hour a day is spent on social media by all of us is concerning to me.
We’re only given a limited amount of time in a week, yet we spend too much of it on sites where we compare ourselves to other people.
I’m not excused from this by any means.
I use social media way too much.
I’m even writing my senior thesis about Facebook.
But I want to adjust my habits to make them healthier.
Constantly scrolling through Facebook and Instagram fills our minds with people’s bests.
We see their best smile, their best outfit, their best moment, their best meal and their best relationships, and then we compare them to ourselves.
We see the good and the bad in ourselves, and we only see the good in others via social media.
We know we struggle, and we know we sometimes don’t live up to expectations, and that’s OK.
But we see something else when it comes to other people.
Then the comparisons begin and deep-rooted self-loathing starts all because we were scrolling through social media and allowing ourselves to get caught up in things that don’t matter.
I’m not saying we need to post all our failures and rough moments on social media, but when we do scroll through our timelines, we need the right mindset.
We need to know what we are seeing is not really how everyone is doing.
We also need to know someone may be struggling even if they post a smiling photo on Instagram.
It’s a hard lesson to internalize, but a necessary one.
And one we now need to teach our parents.