Last week I posted a little snippit from Chapter 1 of my book (coming out in December, fingers crossed!) and today I’m posting a snippet of Chapter two, “Negative Influence”. Enjoy!
I was born at the best time; 1983, right before shit hit the fan. My brother, born in 1996, also (barely) a Millennial, but basically a Gen Z kid, wasn’t as lucky. The Gen Z generation was the first to grow up with smart phones, complete internet access, and social media. I compare social media to cigarettes. When it first came out, everyone thought it was amazing! Everyone used it, especially young impressionable kids. But soon (although not soon enough) the truth began to unfold, and it was not pretty. Social media is addictive and has a negative effect on our mental well-being, as described in the book “The Anxious Generation”. Adults aren’t immune, a review of the research provides ample data “that excessive and passive social media use increases depression, anxiety, and loneliness” (20). I feel lucky to have only been given access to “instant messenger” as a young teenager. I know what social media does for me now, as an adult, and can only imagine how much it would have affected me as a kid, pre- teen, teenager, and young adult. In 2024 I decided to completely delete all social media from my phone. Even with a business, which many people warned would be a mistake, I pressed the delete button and never looked back. Before then, every time I picked up my phone, I found myself scrolling through endless pictures of friends, strangers, and inevitably feeling worse after doing so. It took a lot of self-reflection to realize this. “This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the lonelier and more depressed you become.” – Quoted from the Anxious Generation
Social media can lead to depression, isolation, and self-loathing, but it can also lead to disordered eating and eating disorders. You may be most familiar with eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa (intense restriction of food, leading to low body weight), Bulimia Nervosa (regular episodes of bingeing and purging) and Binge Eating Disorder (regular episodes of eating larger than usual amounts of food), but there is a newer one, Orthorexia Nervosa. Although it does not have any formal diagnostic criteria, it can be serious. In contrast to other eating disorders that mainly involve a focus on the body, orthorexia nervosa involves a primary fixation on the “purity” or “healthiness” of food. Have you ever watched an Instagram reel and left feeling like you wanted to completely rid of everything in your cabinet, and start over? Have you ever second guessed a food decision because an influencer used fearmongering tactics to tell you, without ample evidence, that a certain ingredient was killing you? One study showed “higher Instagram use was associated with a greater tendency towards orthorexia nervosa, with no other social media channel having this effect” (21). We are flooded with so much information from the endless scrolling we are doing, day in and day out. It is true that knowledge is power, but we’ve saturated our knowledge database with useless and/or inaccurate information, and it’s harming us.
What about body image? The book “More Than a Body”, by sisters Lindsay and Lexie Kite, describes that advertising (largely targeted at girls and women) relies upon us believing two things 1) our happiness, health, and ability to be loved are dependent on our appearance and 2) it is possible to achieve physical ideals- and thus become worthy of happiness, health, and love – with the help of the right products or services. In my time on social media, it was clear that many of the things my own unique algorithm was selling to me was involving aging, and you know, “staying young”. This often meant reducing wrinkles, body shrinking, hair growth and thickener, and whatever other youthful beauty products they could push to me, the middle-aged woman.
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