Very few forms of social media give us the feeling of being more connected.
In fact, most social media use tends to have the opposite effect—it makes us feel more socially isolated.
And if I had to speculate, I’d say it’s because what most of us are optimizing for on social media is popularity—posts that get the most “likes,” comments, saves, etc.
But, optimizing for popularity doesn’t bring you closer to individual people. Just like trying to be liked by everyone is a great strategy to not be particularly liked by anyone. Lack of connection isn’t a byproduct of a lack of breadth of connections… it’s the result of the lack of depth.
In other words, what we’re missing isn’t popularity signals—we’re missing deep conversation opportunities.
If I think back to my school days, nobody wanted to be unpopular, but neither was anybody managing their social appearance profiles full-time behind a screen. When you take the screens away, people don’t get to edit themselves—they simply present who they are in real time. No filters, no perfect angles or lighting, no refined and uncharacteristically profound language.
Just people being their imperfect selves who are all figuring it out as they go.
This is what’s missing.
And if you’re feeling lonely, might I recommend a healthy decrease in screen time and a healthy increase in reality time. Allow yourself to be messy, mistaken, and odd. You might turn away the “clean,” “correct,” “popular” ones. But, the other messy, mistaken, and odd ones will find you and be so damn happy you showed up as you did.
P.s. Have you ever been on this kind of blind date?