Shortly after my divorce one of the first things I did was shut off social media. Besides the usual barrage of questions I realized that most of my circle were really tied to my ex-wife and the stress of contact was too much for me to deal with.
As I’ve slowly reached back out to some of the people I felt close to I realized that there’s a trend towards quantity of friends versus the caliber of friends. As a target shooter I prefer using caliber than quality, so bear with me. Social media conceptually is a neat idea, I get that. Reconnecting, staying informed about distant friends is all well and good. Somewhere down the line though social media shifted and it became more about the idea of followers or a sense of external validation. Just about every social media structure is about who liked your post or how many re-shares or views you garnered. That’s never appealed to me. The idea that a post is worthy or unworthy of attention or comment has always seemed weird. While these days my social media foot print is extremely small and very curated. I’d like to think that now in my forties I’ve come to believe that it’s the degree of closeness with my circle that’s been more important.
Caliber of friends, not quantity matters more to me. It’s one thing to have 20 friends give you a one word “Nice” to a post and quite a different thing to have someone talk to you about what you wrote or what you re-shared. We’ve lost a bit of that in the social networking world of today. It’s rather ironic for me as I work in a tech related field. When it comes to friendships however even a two sentence followup to me feels better than having any actual number of likes. Don’t get me wrong, in Reddit i almost never down vote anything. If something is genuinely interesting and I think someone else might want to see it, I’ll up vote. Call me karma indiscriminate if you want but if that up vote makes someone else that I don’t know happy, then hey what’s the harm.
Navigating any social networking space with depression feels like a game of minesweeper. There was a time that I enjoyed reading about anime, photography etc, then I realized those environments would trigger negative thinking and memories of my married life. Things I had no want to revisit. These days I don’t think of just random people who engage me online as ‘friends’, they are contacts, acquaintances . Like minded they may be but we don’t have any deeper degree of interaction. This change in how I treat the online community has made a world of difference for me. I choose to engage people and it lets me focus on the content and sincerity of the conversations.
Life is hard enough juggling mental health in any form. While the online world can be a useful resource and sometimes an escape hatch, it’s also full of potential hazards. Finding an efficient way to navigate it will always be a challenge. If you’re finding those types of communities are pushing you into a dark place, take that step back, look at filtering the information you subject yourself to. Here’s hoping you are able to find a good corner of the net to call your own.