This is Vanese Ferguson with Coffee Talk.

I miss the days when our world wasn’t so heavily shaped by social media platforms. For one, the amount of negativity and finger pointing that it generates is destructive especially for anyone who has difficulty shutting out the noise. I read a paper recently which indicated usage among Americans 12 to 34 years old across several platforms had leveled off or was waning, of course this was pre-COVID, while 2019 research from Global Web Index suggested that the amount of time millennial and Gen Z audiences were spending on many social platforms was either flat, declining, or not rising as greatly as it had in years’ past. It would seem that there are too many eyes, too many voices, too little privacy. The Harvard article referred to it as feeling like you were constantly stuck in a busy airport. Weirdly the pandemic seems to have both increased and decreased the effect. Many more people are grabbing on to real experiences like going skating, going for walks, getting interested in new things outside the the house they have essentially at times been confined to. On the other side of the coin are those who have been going through this isolating experience, continuing the isolating habits by spending more time scrolling through their newsfeeds on their phones rather than having authentic experiences with real life. My point is that things were a lot less, well, complicated in the era before social media became king. And the amount of time we spend navel gazing, essentially a daily selfie, is somewhat unhealthy. I’m not saying go about life blindly but maybe just employ some basic tenets of society like remembering to be polite, don’t gossip, don’t be mean, show respect and courtesy and instead of letting faceless talking heads be a guide just step out each day with your best foot forward.