Inside our smartphone-dominated lives, digital connectivity has transformed into the central mechanism we share with one another.
source: framer
What started as simple tools for keeping connected has become something incredibly more twisted.
The Unrealistic Expectations Epidemic
Without question the most damaging attribute of social media is how it stimulates endless competition.
Every viewing through our apps submerges us with meticulously crafted immaculate displays of others’ experiences.
We experience amazing trips, ideal romances, outstanding successes, and beautiful family experiences.
In the background, our real-world situations look underwhelming by reference.
The constant exposure to fabricated lifestyles produces impractical benchmarks for our intimate bonds.
The Cognitive Exploitation Framework
Online services have been deliberately architected to commandeer our focus.
Each mechanism has been methodically refined to keep us scrolling.
Persistent engagement, ongoing interruptions, and targeted stimulation merge strategies to engineer addiction-like behaviors.
The persistent activation modifies our mental patterns to require fast feedback.
If we aren’t feeling habitual digital satisfaction, we suffer restless, disengaged, or disconnected.
The Closeness Eliminator
Most frighteningly is how virtual connection compromises true emotional intimacy.
Genuine connection needs absolute awareness, vulnerability, and protected time together.
Digital platforms builds obstructions to each important element.
During shared time, frequent disturbances steal our presence away from our companion physically present.
Instead of participating in valuable exchanges, we get trapped compulsively updating through virtual feeds.
As opposed to revealing our meaningful observations and impressions, we get consumed with posting our situations for electronic demonstration.
The Digital Approval Syndrome
Electronic networks has altered the way we seek validation and self-validation.
In the past we cultivated our self-regard from significant breakthroughs, self-improvement, and genuine connections, we currently discover we’re frantically pursuing online appreciation.
Approval indicators, observations, distributions, and follows change to our important evaluations for analyzing our personal value.
This external validation mutates into compulsive because it’s unreliable, temporary, and fundamentally empty.
Separate from substantial gains or genuine interpersonal ties, superficial approval offers only fleeting happiness.
The Opinion Silo Syndrome
Online recommendation engines have been manufactured to offer us articles that conforms to our existing worldview.
This builds thought isolation where we’re ceaselessly presented to viewpoints that corroborates what we currently think.
Behind the scenes, different positions are eliminated, developing an continuously fragmenting societal architecture.
This splitting pervades our meaningful relationships, creating remarkable quantities of separation between allies, kin, and romantic partners.
The Comparison Culture
Virtual platforms has escalated our built-in disposition to weigh ourselves to members of our community.
What in the past was confined within contrasting ourselves to family members has widened to include endless unknown persons universally.
STATS ABOUT DIVORCES/RELATIONSHIPS
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
https://www.familyrelationships.gov.au/separation
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1441&context=studentpub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_divorce