Happy New Year! Welcome to 2023 everyone. The New Year is a time for reflection and reset. We consider where we are in life, what we want to achieve, and what we want to change about ourselves. So, with the New Year comes the inevitable slew of resolutions. And I know what you’re thinking: no-one sticks to their resolutions. But that’s not true! This article refers to a study in the journal PLos One that shows “55% of participants considered themselves successful in sustaining their New Year’s resolutions from the previous year.” That’s far from no-one. So, I think we all need to seize the opportunity to consider our social media usage, and whether it’s something that we can change with a resolution.
Let’s start by looking at 2022.
2022 was a tumultuous year for social media and the internet. A lot of us reconsidered our engagement with it.
- We watched the crumbling of one of our biggest social media platforms, and its dramatic faceplant after its purchase by someone who didn’t actually want it, and has no clue what to do with it. As hate speech and fake news were allowed to flood back onto the platform in the name of “free speech”, many of us reconsidered if it was a healthy place for us to be, and bailed. As the other major social media platforms erode away what originally drew us to them, maybe we should reconsider our use of all of them.
- NFTs and Cryptocurrency were also something we watched crash and burn last year. Bitcoin today is valued at around $16,000, down from the peak at over $65,000 in November 2021, and way below the YouTuber Carl Runefelt’s prediction that it would reach $300,000 on Fox Business. NFTs too are now practically worthless compared with this time last year. The company behind the Bored Ape NFTs, probably the most famous and “valuable”, were recently hit with a class-action lawsuit arguing that their use of celebrity endorsements artificially inflated interest and prices. So much initial interest was amplified by social media. But people seem to have reconsidered.
- The public and institutions have generally become more aware of the damaging effects of social media. Celebrities and us regular folks alike are seeing the benefits of a social media detox, with evidence that just a short-term break is beneficial. Even the Love Island contestants, usually glued to their socials, have been banned from using social media during the show for their own welfare, following previous tragic consequences of online trolling.
So my Resolution is to reduce how much of an impact Social Media has on my life. But how am I going about it?
That same study I mentioned earlier on New Year’s resolutions further discovered that “approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals“. This basically means that we’re psychologically more willing to try new things than get rid of our old habits. Let’s take the example of exercise. ‘I don’t want to be a couch-potato’ is harder to tackle than ‘I want to try a new sport’. If your resolution is framed as a fun new activity or experience, it’s easier to motivate yourself to do it. So rather than ‘I want to be on social media less’, maybe try ‘I want to live more in the moment’ or ‘I want to fully experience the Mesaverse‘. Shift the focus from the negative to the positive.
The scale of your goals should also be considered when making resolutions. For example, the goal of ‘Quit Social Media’ is unrealistic for a lot of people. Going cold-turkey that’s become such a big part of our lives in unlikely to work for long. Getting sucked back in will be too tempting. Make a smaller goal like reducing time on socials to a certain level every day (most smartphones have screen-time trackers). Or quit a single social media platform rather than everything. These may be more achievable first steps.
This is where LifeBonder and its values come in handy.
LifeBonder’s goal is to fight the negative impact of social media. LifeBonder is a social media platform that’s designed to get you offline. The aim is to help you form real-world relationships, by linking you to like-minded people nearby. Social media has encouraged an epidemic of loneliness across the world, but that can be changed. The article ‘Do New Year’s resolutions really work?‘ by Lou Mudge for Live Science makes the a point of the importance of group motivation for maintaining resolutions. If you’re concerned about the effects of social media on your wellbeing, you aren’t alone. LifeBonder shares those feelings. So let the people in your life know about your goals, and find people who share your aims, and hopefully by the end of 2023 you’ll be living a happier, more fulfilling life.
Polly Cumming
Polly Cumming is a British literary graduate keen on writing about human existence in this moment in time. She's thrilled to see some positive change in the world of social media.
