Hi, I'm Emma, 18, a Young Ambassador and I spend a week trying to cut down on my social media.
Over the past 10 years social media has been growing to the point where most people can’t go an hour without looking at it, whether it be their Twitter feed, Facebook timeline or Snapchat story. I’ve definitely been guilty of this, I got to the point where I was checking Twitter every fifteen minutes and Facebook every couple of hours. That was until I realised something, I didn’t know why I was doing it, the same people were saying the same things every day and yet I kept on reading them, I realised the whole thing annoyed me.
When you see the same people complaining about the same things day after day it can become a bit, tiresome. You might say I should follow some new people or get some different friends but that’s not what I did. I decided instead for more drastic action, I decided to try and dramatically cut down how much social media I look at so for a week I did my best to keep it at a minimum. So whenever I felt like scrolling through my Twitter, I’d open my book instead or focus on my writing and not checking Facebook. I even went as far as to delete my Facebook app altogether, though keeping the messenger one, just because I wanted to cut down on looking at social media didn’t mean I wanted to ignore my friends.
Trying to cut down on something you do a lot, sometimes without really realising how much you’re doing it can he hard, but not as hard as you think. The only times I opened Facebook were the few times I had messages and I can’t say I’ve missed it, my timeline is still full of the same things, half of them I’ve seen before. I don’t even feel like I missed out on anything which I thought I would do. At the end of the week I wasn’t desperate to get the app back, instead I’m going to use the extra memory for favourite songs and photos.
Twitter was actually much harder of the two to cut down on, not only because it was the one I checked on the most, but just because it was so easy. I was terrible for opening it every few minutes and refreshing it all the time, when the adverts came on or just when my attention wondered and I wanted something to look at. It was Twitter that actually made me realise how annoyed I was becoming with my social media; there’s a lot of drama and sometimes you just want to leave it all behind. So every time I found myself going to open a new tab or the app I put it down instead, I picked up my book, talked to my family or even went outside.
Have you ever been to a concert or any kind of show and seen people watching everything through their phones? Why spend all that money just to watch through a screen instead of what’s in front of you? Don’t become that person, who’s so desperate to get the best selfie they miss what’s in front of them. Life is about living, about going out and experiencing things not just watching them. Your life is yours, don’t live it by being obsessed with everybody else. There’s a world out there and it’s so easy to get lost in a world of followers, friends and instagram likes that you forget what’s outside. There’s nothing wrong with having any of these things, they’re a great way to connect to people around the world just don’t forget to go outside once in awhile and experience the real world because it’s amazing.