Venting People are way too online nowadays and it sucks

[miles-away]

I try to block as much social media as possible. It's a time sink designed to keep you addicted and angry 24/7. It kind of sucks that everyone now is permanently online and will spends hours mindlessly scrolling through tiktok or Twitter. Just consuming the dregs of humanity everyday.

And its fucking depressing and weird to see 40, 50, 60 year old politicians and celebrities on Twitter all day and repeating shit you have to be chronically online to understand. It's weird to see my 61 year old mother decide to stay inside all day and just consume mindless twitter slop all day.

I feel like I'm coming across as a pretentious twat. But I thinks it's bad that society is now structured in a way that you have to be on Twitter or Instagram constantly to understand what's going on in society. I didn't know about the Sydney Sweeney Jean controversy until Trump started to talk about it. And it's concerning that stupid Twitter drama is now national fucking news.

Idk. I don't know why more people aren't fatigued by the internet and the constant onslaught of media and memes and news it spews out on an hourly basis. I'm gen z and I fucking sick of it after living with it for so long.

 

[Alpacachino]

It depends. My mother grew up without the Internet. Didn't know how to use a phone. She was using a dumb phone just for making calls and nothing else. For her birthday seven years ago, I got her a nice smart phone. She fell in love with it and now she can watch pictures of her grandkids on WhatsApp and all of that stuff, make Internet phone calls, browse YouTube and post comments . Learn cooking recipes.She, however, doesn't have Facebook, Instagram, any of that stuff.

She absolutely loves the phone and spends a good amount of time online but she's definitely not all day on it.Switching to that phone really changed her life for the better. But yeah, spending too much time online is just bad for you like doing too much of anyone thing is.

 

[maylurker]

It's a time sink designed to keep you addicted and angry 24/7.

yeah i deleted tiktok and my life got way better

 

[violetforever]

i was going to make a thread about this so thank u for already making one! social media has already been going downhill for a while but after seeing my own mother and a friend become addicted and reliant on it i've decided to check out entirely. i'm gen z too so it's not surprising i've let social media have control over me as a teenager/young adult but i think it's seeing older people addicted to it that makes it so much worse. they are the ones who are supposed to be above it since they grew up without the internet or just the early minimal stages of it.

i'll start with my mother. i can't even remember what she did with her time before getting an iphone. she had a facebook account before but now that she has a phone that functions better she's addicted to it. i avoid being around her because i can't stand her anyway but all she does is sit and scroll/post on facebook all day. this has made her unbearable. 99% of her friends on there are random people she has never met except from facebook groups. i think she purposely doesn't add family members on there so she has a place to post whatever and never be called out since nobody knows her on a personal level except for whatever she shares. but she shares practically everything as far as i know. if we go out somewhere i'll see her take her phone out and start typing a status about it. thank god she makes her account private for friends only so neither i or anybody else could see for themselves. the statuses are probably bad enough but she also has to take photos of everything including herself. she literally takes photos of herself at stop lights or if we're just sitting at home she will open her camera. then she edits them with an app before posting. now she even does AI generated images of herself. so not only is my mom humiliating, insecure and immature but neglectful too since my youngest sister already understands that my mom has an addiction and complains about her not even looking up from the phone when she tries to talk to her. my mother's way of dealing with this is letting my sister have an addiction to watching tv all day. she can't even sit at the dinner table and finish eating because she gets up to go back to the tv.

my friend makes me even sadder. we don't talk anymore because of this addiction and others but i will still refer to him as my friend because i'll always care about him. he basically chose social media over me and everybody else in his life. to be fair i only know him online so what do i matter? but it depresses me to no end because he is so smart, so handsome, so seemingly accomplished in life with his career, family, lifelong friends that you think he would never fall into something like this, especially since he never even used social media much before this happened, but no. now all he does is waste his days drunkenly arguing about politics online with people, flirting/cheating with women, just aimlessly talking to weird strangers online for validation. i will never understand it. i have never seen so much wasted potential. i used to believe these strange people were beneath him but maybe he has stooped to their level now. i know he is insecure and must be more depressed/suicidal than i picked up on and this is an escape for him because he hides it from people he actually knows in person. there's nothing i can do about it so i left it alone.

i know i'm typing on a forum right now under an anonymous username but am i allowed to argue that it's not the same at all as what i just described about social media? i don't think you sounded pretentious at all, just aware of how brain rotting social media has become.

 

[Chocomel]

I really really feel you on this one. The only social media where I actively go social is this forum, idk if you can even call this social media, but this is the place online where I socialize. I use discord but I only talk with only one friend in there, same with IG, Twitter, Facebook, I only talk with that one friend. The fact that social media/internet is very big right now where if you gone a single day without it you will be left behind is very concerning to me. I am forced to use social media because even right now where I take my education need it. I hate that you need to chronically active on social media so you can get information about what is going on

 

[Pluto]