Our generation, late 80’s – early 2000’s, the millennial babies, have brought with us some amazing contributions to the world around us, one of the greatest being our attitude regarding our involvement in the world. Unlike generation X that came before us, whose most well represented response when asked why they were attending college was to “cash in financially,” we are going to college to expand our philosophies about life, and grow as individuals. Our focus is on changing the world, reducing our carbon footprint, fighting for equality. We involve ourselves in the political arena, we campaign for things we believe in and let our voices be heard, well, for the most part.
Yes when is comes to views of diversity, attitudes around civic engagement, and political and social values we have no problem speaking our minds, researching, and making informed arguments. But when it comes to communicating on an interpersonal level we may as well be alone lost out at sea, checking our instagram likes and passive aggressively tweeting about one another not even realizing how absent we are from our lives. We endlessly preach on authenticity, but we rarely practice it. In a world where we “settle” our conflicts in subtweets and prove our love by texting back right away how can we ever feel fulfilled with another human being, or with ourselves, for that matter.
We often define our relationships in accordance with how much our partner is willing to broadcast their feelings for us to others, online ,and not so much by how they actually feel for us. Waking up to a long text in the morning and a weekly instagram post mean more to us than spoken word, because if you didn’t get a snapchat video of him telling you how beautiful you are does it count? When our friends are going through a tough time we can send much more loving and reassuring words via text than we can ever say to them in person. The very thought of human to human interaction terrifies us, eye contact leaves no room for autocorrect.
It all boils down to the fickle nature of our generation, we praise inconsistency in every facet of life. We crave the excitement of what we think is love, but when it comes time to invest in another person, to compromise, sacrifice, to showcase selflessness, we back the hell off. When the effort that goes into a friendship starts to take away from our personal time, we pull away. When we don’t get what we want as soon as we want it we give up and say “fine, I’ll try something else.” We are quitters, we decide to sell our car just because it’s run out of gas. We crave instant gratification in everything we do, through our social media, our careers and passion areas, or relationships and our friendships. We don’t want to work for it, we just want it all to work out. By working for it we commit ourselves to something that we may lose, so to avoid that commitment we just quit when the time comes to put effort in. We like things easy and accessible, and most of all, indirect.
If we speak aloud how we feel for someone, we can’t go back and edit it, we can’t delete or erase everything before we hit send, if we speak outloud we commit and that’s what we are most afraid of. Turning off our phones and spending the remainder of the evening free from digital distraction is dangerous, going to a concert and living for the experience doesn’t count as living unless you get every song on video, we can’t even got to the gym without having to offer up some kind of proof to at least one of our social media profiles. This has removed self gratification from our lives and replaced it with a need for fulfillment through others approval. Approval that comes from a little virtual heart that rarely conveys love.
But is social media really the issue? Or is it a fault in our generalizable personality traits? If we leave our phone at home and go out to coffee with a friend, co worker, stranger, significant other, will we struggle because we don’t have the safe space of our phone to retreat to, or is it a user error. Although this distinction may be hard to conclude, I do know that I have never heard of someone exchanging social media interaction for human interaction and not benefitting from it.
I do not have a definitive answer for the questions and issues presented in this article, but sometimes active thinking, and just being conscious is the biggest battle, something to think about.