Almost everyone has one or even several social media accounts. When I say almost everyone, it means that there are still a few who doesn’t have any social media accounts.

So, having an account instills a sense of pride, and if for any reason you don’t have one, you may be considered a weirdo, especially in a certain crowd. Our social media obsession has been always a big puzzle for me, personally, that I’ve started to think about and observe this phenomenon more closely.

I remember many years ago when I was a young girl, I lived with my family after one relationship and after another. My brother came up to me one evening and told me” hey, check this out” and showed me the first social media in my country — even before the era of Facebook. Sure enough, I started studying it, found it interesting, and registered for an account. The idea was to find people you went to school or university, or spent your childhood with because life’s challenges have somehow separated you and your friends, making them scattered all over the world. I found this very interesting as I had some friends from school that left the country.

I remember myself spending lots of time at the beginning exploring and being fascinated. Needles to say, there were no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, so that social media was very new. It still exists but it’s nowhere close to being like Facebook today.

But that’s not something I wanted to talk about. I want to bring to your attention a different topic.

Several years later, Facebook was created, and then Twitter, Snapchat and so on. People got so wired by the concept of social media. A lot of people increasingly spent more and more time in internet, befriending people. Friend lists started to grow tremendously. People who have thousands friends and proud that they do. Numerous people became obsessed with liking each other pictures. Others put their pictures up right after they took a photo. They post their location, achievements, daily “doings” and so on. Some people do that in order to prove others wrong (like family members who thought that they’d never make it, or an ex), to create jealousy, or out of hubris. Anyhow, the emotions in which a lot of people post things aren’t usually truly healthy. People with healthy emotions and attitudes are less likely to have these accounts because they are so busy with their million dollar businesses, or their wonderful family and children, as opposed to those who are on Facebook. You get the picture.

I started to ponder about this phenomena.

We all want to have friends, to be social, and to be accepted and loved. However, we have grown to be such an egomaniacs that we care only about our own interests.

The other day, I had coffee with an acquaintance who told me that she wants me to tell her something only when she asks for it, and if she doesn’t want to hear it, I should just suck it up. Keep in mind that usually if you care, and you see them falling down or moving into a wrong direction, you’d be the one to say: hey you, please stop, you are about to fall off a cliff. In my case, I was told: I want you to be my puppet and I don’t care what about your personality and how you treat me; I care only about what I want.

Do you think it is a singular example? No, it’s one in thousands.

Coming back to social media. People desperately want to have friends, interests and to communicate, but the only way they are ready to do it is through social media. Do you know why?

Because we’ve forgotten how to build relationships.

Maybe forgotten is not the correct word. We’ve probably become so lazy and concerned about ourselves that we just don’t want to put any kind of effort into building relationships. Building relationships means giving selflessly, sacrificing a lot of time and resources while getting nothing out of it. Healthy relationships mean going into them with an open heart and being ready to get hurt as we are open and vulnerable beings. This is because true relationships are build on truthfulness and openness. That hurts! One should be able to embrace that and work through anything that comes to your way in order to make a relationship work. How many of us are ready for that? A few?

Lots of people grew up in broken families end up having notions of self-annihilation and self-hatred. Many of us don’t even realize that we have it. But that is different story.

So, back to social media. It turns out that we’re all like that acquaintance of mine: we want what we want, at what time we want it and in the way we want it. We’re not ready to give anything to anyone, but we’re eager to take. We have reached a point where we get nervous if no one writes on our page, or like our pictures, or comment on our posts. Every time you see a person happily smiling and staring at their cell phone, it’s usually because someone said something on social media. People are no longer comfortable being physically around other people. Have you seen how some people start playing with their phones in an elevator? What is it? Neurosis? Yes, of some sort.

We’ve completely forgot that relationships are the most essential and important part of our lives. We can’t live without it and there is no media or device that can substitute human contact. We’re trying to trick ourselves but why? Because our era unfortunately promotes an obsession with career, money, material goods… There is nothing wrong with that, but no one told us that women have to remain as women and work on their feminine energy, and by doing so, not focus on having a career, but focus on their family and children instead. No one told men that they need to protect women and be men the way they have for centuries. No one told us that values have to stay the same and should not be totally destroyed, which confuses everyone and caused many of us to lose sight of normality after being affected by distorted pictures and images. There is no one to show us how lost we got in our modern society. We have all that self-help books around, and many of us read everything there is, but still can’t help ourselves and feel even more miserable than before we started to educate ourselves.

We have social media where we try to create more and more friends so we can proudly proclaim: I have many friends.

But forget Facebook. What friends are they when there is no real contact, only a virtual one? Does it bring any satisfaction? No. At the end of the day we still feel lonely and miserable and afraid. Only human connection and relationships with each other, and with God are able to build our confidence in tomorrow. But we all need to work on that. We need to be ready to fall, then get up and continue. Do you think we are so selfish that we’re ready to destroy ourselves rather than overcoming our fears and live in reality?

Didn’t we have enough of an illusionary life with only future or past, but without today? Without the wind playing with your hair at that moment, without a child playing in front of you and running to you to give you a sweet hug…

Are we that ignorant and egoistic?