I live by the river, so I go on walks quite often. What I see often happening is parents at their picnic tables with their kids, but the parents are completely not present. They are so consumed by checking in on their feeds, rather than having physical interactions with their kids. We are distant from our spouses and our kids solely because social media is taking over our lives.
Anytime my husband and I are out at dinner, more than half of the people sitting at a table waiting for their food are not engaging with the people they’re with. Both (if not all people) at the tables are watching videos, scrolling through their feed and commenting on other people’s posts.
Stop having interactions with people’s posts, and start having interactions with the humans you’re around.
The closeness of any relationship has to come from being there for each other, from engaging with your kids, and building that relationship together. It doesn’t come from what social media tells us to do, and what the next viral post is about.
Social media is not giving us healthy relationships, but it’s destroying them because we’re mentally not present with our loved ones. Our minds are constantly thinking of what someone commented on our last post, on that viral video we just watched, on what that exercise guru just posted, and so on and so forth.
Our brain is spinning with information overload, but what we’re not understanding is that, that information is completely useless.
Let’s go back to our relationships and start building them on trust, communicating, and engaging with our loved ones on a daily basis.
You know, back in the day when we would walk our dogs we would run into our neighbors and have a chat that would lead for hours. Those chats were engaging and productive. Those chats lead to social activities with our neighbors, having bbq’s together and getting to know them personally. Those neighbors gave each other jobs, they helped each other out with fixing up their house, with babysitting, and the list goes on. Now, with the help of new and improved technology people are stuck behind a screen in their homes that when they see their neighbors walking down the street, they run the other way.
Are you afraid of engaging in social interactions with your neighbors? Hey, even if you think they’re weird, what about a “good morning” every once in a while? You never know how they can come back around and help you out.
In our neighborhood, we know all of our neighbors by their names. Our neighbor to the left is Sherri and she has the most amazing fig tree. We’ve been inside her backyard to get some mint and peaches from her tree. We had the honor to learn more about her personal life and about her kids. Anytime she’s not feeling well we’ll get her trash and roll it into her yard.
The guy across the street, kind of kitty corner to the left, lives with his wife. He’s retired (actually all of our immediate neighbors are retired). His name is Connie and my husband loves him! He’s helped my husband out with the yard plenty of times. There’s been a few times where we’ve left the garage door open (more like – I left it wide open) after leaving the house for the day, and he was so generous to go into the garage, close it and walk out the side gate.
The lady across the street has a really nice house. She used to have a pond, but since redid her landscape to open up her backyard to make it exquisite. Her name is Vicky and she uses most of her spare time babysitting her grandson (cutest little munchik ever!) and walking her dogs.
I can go on for days about our neighbors and sometimes even our back neighbors. There’s nothing wrong with socializing with your neighbors.
More and more relationships are being torn apart and broken down because of the lack of communication. We avoid communicating with our loved ones because we’re sucked into what social media has to offer. The only thing that it’s offering is a big whole in our lives that will never be filled.
What about the relationships with your spouse and your kids? Do you have a true connection when you are out with them, or are you constantly avoiding conversations by scrolling through your feed?
Why is that I see the parents constantly on their phones at the river? Why aren’t they engaging with them and spending quality time with their kids?
Get to know them on a personal level, but the only way you would ever do that is when you turn off that social media.
Don’t let social media consume your life to the point where you don’t even know how your spouse’s day was. To the point where you don’t even know how your kids day went in school. Are you actively pursuing to have a great relationship with all the people you interact with, or are you running across the street from them?
Next time, you see that neighboor who walks his dog every single day at the same time, strike a “good morning,” or a “good evening” and see how your relationship grows from there.
Hey, if they’re not so social, what’s the worst that will happen?
Now, start making a change in your life by turning off that social media. I did that over a year ago, and I cannot look back at it!
