Ask around and you will find that almost everyone has at least one, if not more, social media account. Having an account instills a sense of pride, and if for any reason you don’t have one, you may be considered a weirdo, especially in a certain crowd. Our social media obsession has always been a big puzzle for me, personally, that I’ve started to think about and observe this phenomenon more closely.

When Facebook was created, then Twitter, Snapchat and so on, people got so wired by the concept of social media. A lot of people increasingly spent more and more time on the internet, befriending people. Friend lists started to grow tremendously. People now have thousands friends and proud that they do. Numerous people became obsessed with liking each other’s pictures. Others put their pictures up right after they took a photo. They posted their location, achievements, daily “doings” and so on. Some people do that in order to prove others wrong (like family members who thought they’d never make it, or an ex), to create jealousy, or out of hubris. Anyhow, the emotions in which a lot of people post things aren’t usually healthy. People with healthy emotions and attitudes are less likely to have these accounts because they are so busy with their million dollar businesses or their wonderful family and children, as opposed to those who are on Facebook.

I started to ponder about this phenomena.

We all want to have friends, to be social, and to be accepted and loved. People desperately want to have friends, interests and to communicate, but the only way they are ready to do it is through social media. Do you know why?

We’ve forgotten how to build relationships.

Maybe forgotten is not the correct word. We’ve probably become so lazy and concerned about ourselves that we just don’t want to put any kind of effort into building relationships. Building relationships means giving selflessly, sacrificing a lot of time and resources while getting nothing out of it. Healthy relationships mean going into them with an open heart and being ready to get hurt as we are open and vulnerable beings. This is because true relationships are built on truthfulness and openness. One should be able to embrace that and work through anything that comes their way in order to make a relationship work. How many of us are ready for that? A few?

It turns out that we all have the same mentality: we want what we want, when we want it and in the way we want it. We’re not ready to give anything to anyone, but we’re eager to take. We have reached a point where we get nervous if no one writes on our page, or likes our pictures, or comments on our posts. Every time you see a person happily smiling and staring at their cell phone, it’s usually because someone said something on social media. People are no longer comfortable being physically around other people. Have you seen how some people start playing with their phones in an elevator? What is it? Neurosis? Yes, of some sort.

We’ve completely forgotten that relationships are the most essential and important part of our lives. We can’t live without it and there is no media or device that can substitute human contact. We’re trying to trick ourselves but why? Because our era unfortunately promotes an obsession with career, money, material goods. No one told us that values have to stay the same and should not be totally destroyed, which confuses everyone and causes many of us to lose sight of normality after being affected by distorted pictures and images. There is no one to show us how lost we got in our modern society. We have all those self-help books around, and many of us read everything there is, but we still can’t help ourselves. Leading us to feel even more miserable than before we started to educate ourselves.

We have social media where we try to create more and more friends so we can proudly proclaim: I have many friends.

What kind of friends are they when there is no real contact, only a virtual one? Does it bring any satisfaction? No. At the end of the day we still feel lonely and miserable and afraid. Only human connection and relationships with each other and God are able to build our confidence up. But we all need to work on that. We need to be ready to fall, then get up and continue. Do you think we are so selfish that we’re ready to destroy ourselves rather than overcome our fears and live in reality?