Mentally abandoning social media

There are things that we find disturbing in the world around us. We may feel compelled to fight against what we see as injustice. Our compassion may draw us toward helping our fellow humans. We have our beliefs, our values and our attitudes. We also have our biases and prejudices.

The truth is, our experiences can make us sensitive to certain things that we judge to be especially bad or wrong. Those same experiences can, however, make us unaware of so much else. I see this every time I log in to my social media accounts.

I have been trying to decipher the messages that God has sent during Lent. Admittedly, I have still been struggling to pray as regularly as I had planned, but I strongly believe that God has been answering. Putting it all together now, there is one message that has become clear. In exercising compassion, we should never forget to show compassion to ourselves. A part of that self-compassion is accepting that there are things over which we have little or no control, and worrying excessively about them will only make us more anxious.

Many of us now hear news stories, and what the people we know think and feel about them, via social media. We may hear how people we know or don't know plan to fight against what they see as an injustice. We may feel that we want to support them in their fight. We may feel that we want to oppose them. All of us are prone, on occasion, to believing that our way of seeing things is the only correct way.

During Lent, I have tried to engage less often with social media. I had noticed that looking at social media regularly led to me thinking and feeling things that were definitely not Christian. Anxiety led to anger, which led to a desire to control certain things, as much as possible.

The algorithm noticeably pushes certain narratives. Recently, friends have not responded to my infrequent posts. It is tempting to share more and more often, to get a response, but "tempting" is the key word here. It is currently Lent. I suspect that, rather than friends no longer caring, they are simply not seeing what I have shared. It could be that they have also chosen to engage less frequently with social media.

I once heard a Polish saying translated into English as "Not my circus; not my monkeys." This seems to sum up my current attitude toward social media. To extend the metaphor, we might turn up to see the show occasionally, and then remember why we did not go for such a long time. More importantly, we are spectators, and have no real control over what happens in the circus. Just enjoy the show, and don't take it too seriously.