By Kenneth Stepp
I vanished. Ok, that isn’t true at all. But if perception is reality, I did vanish to many who only know me as an online human instead of being known in real life. You see, I took a break from my two largest online platforms, facebook and instagram. I needed a dose of the real world again.
Many of us live in a fairy tale. I catch myself on the inside from time to time and have to nudge myself back to the real world. Maybe just remind myself that the internet isn’t real. That most of the people we meet are digital friends and not much more.
Before I move on I want to explain that many of my friends and I are really friends, even if we never meet face to face. There are people I have known for years that I value highly that I may never meet anywhere but online. So real friendships can be digital friends only.
Facebook is the most used social media app in the world. It can be time consuming and in many cases, can feel like the real world for some. I’ve certainly gotten lost there before. I’ve felt happy or sad for people there, followed stories about my friends going through terrible things, and even had crushes on some girls there. Online can seem real.
My vanishing act came out of my need for a proper perspective. The drama that social media platforms can bring to our lives can be time consuming, painful, and confusing. We can get lost in the digital world we created. It’s a phenomenon we invented in our minds. I’m of an age that I remember life before all of this.
I write about being single, dating, relationships and more. So, what does social media have to do with dating. Somewhere between everything and too much would be my answer. You see, back when we weren’t staring into our phones all the time we were actually engaged in face to face conversation. We were getting to know the real you and me.
Nowadays things have changed. We can meet someone online, meet for lunch, and if it isn’t going perfectly, we can shop for our next date while still having lunch with our real date. Don’t laugh, I know this happens. My fear is that we are losing the right perspective of the value of others. The sheer volume of possibilities makes us not appreciate those around us enough.
So today I am taking a mental inventory of those in my life. My children, mom, brothers, friends, and yes, even online friends. On the other end of these keys are real people with real feelings and real lives. They love, live, work, play, and even hurt in real time. They are the reason I too a step back from the digital jungle. I want to appreciate them more.
Perspective is important. If we see everyone as options or tools on our shelves we will find ourselves using people. You might say, I’m not a user. But in our minds people are profiles not people. And that right there is my point. I want to use things and love people. It would be easy to scroll through someone’s life and never see their humanity, therefore never seeing their worth.
I want to value others. It takes the right perspective to do that…
“Love is just crazy enough to work in our favor” – kstepp
