Social media might not be evil

Sometime around June 2016, I was running around the beach in Tuticorin (a small town in southern India) taking photos like this one.

Always going ballistic on how social media is destroying people’s ability to connect on a deeper level and trying to start a start-up which will bring people together in the real world.

Maybe the root of my hatred was my sense of insecurity. I felt an intense pressure to post the perfect picture, the smartest content, the wittiest comment. It all seemed like a cruel numbers game. I took the easiest option available, quitting social media altogether and vowed to write an article about it when the time seemed right.

How was life without social media?

It was BLISS.

I missed out on a lot of shit, and I mean it literally. Network effect expounds every issue that pops up and I stayed blissfully ignorant. I neither felt peer pressure nor a sense of accountability.

It was BLISS, until college.

Without social media, I had a ton of time and I had always been interested in entrepreneurship. I read so much about it that I took the leap to try it full-time soon after college.

Only after taking the leap, did I realize the map I had built of this world in my head was so different from reality. It slowly dawned on me that other people existed in this world and they all have reasons for their actions. The definition of my job changed then. It was not to force them to use my product but it is to understand them, accept them as who they are and build something useful for them.

That’s when I joined Instagram, a full decade after it was started. To observe and understand people. Also, because I did want to know what my friends were up to and missed them after college.

My perspective on me changed too. If all that I wanted from social media was to know what my friends were up to, they should want the same from me, right? I never really agonized about what I talked, how I looked when I hung out with them, so why break my head about it just because it’s on an app.

Social media, in my head became an extension of reality. Not a different one.

People say “It’s a small world”

I guess it’s relative. Yes, in the grand scheme of things, our earth is indeed small.

But, it’s old and huge when it comes to humans as a species. (We have been alive for less than 0.00005% of earth’s life and we still don’t know what exist at the deepest oceans)

So, what did humans do?

We created a smaller, virtual world and made it accessible to everyone.

This virtual world has made it possible for ME to tell YOU my story.

That social media might not be evil after all.