How to keep your sanity in the social media realm. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Ignore FOMO (that’d be Fear Of Missing Out)
• Everything is sugarcoated, spun, photoshopped and airbrushed on social media.
• Literally and figuratively: from job promotions to muscle tones.
• It sounds obvious but you’d be surprised at the great deal of grownups whose brittle self-esteem is vulnerable to the onslaught of fakery they are exposed to on social media.
• Let alone kids and teens.
• If someone goes out of their way to ‘gram a party or event they attended, it is quite apparent that they were not having much fun in the first place.
• Most “content creators” (reporters, journalists, editors, influencers) are running around in circles.
• Disoriented and scared shxtless of losing their jobs in the current state of accelerated media disruption.
• Under the gun to produce industrial amounts of content to feed the beast.
• Stressed out and overworked.
• Their employers, superiors and, especially, the evil algorithm demand prodigious amounts of material.
• In this context, quality has taken a backseat to quantity.
• Big time.
• Vetting and fact checking are luxuries of a bygone era.
• Social media is the realm of fallacy, half-truths and half-baked baloney.
• Everybody thinks they are a genius on social media and everybody dreams of monetizing their brainfarts.
• Paradoxically, those who have managed to make a living out of their socmed activity are clueless as to what their formula actually is.
• Namely Pewdiepie, James Charles et al.
• Under the guise of spontaneity and “being oneself”, they are shooting in the dark.
• Ad libbing.
• Building the plane in the air.
• This can be a source of strenuous anxiety for most influencers, particularly those of a young age &/or devoid of maturity to deal with uncertainty or fear of failure.
• Additionally, social media fame is cruel and fleeting.
• Instagram is plagued with flavors of the month who will be bagging burgers at some drive-through in a matter of weeks.
• Morale of the story: resist the siren song and stay in college.
• To borrow a phrase from college campuses: politics on social media is so vicious because the stakes are so low.
• As conventional wisdom has it, most people are on social media for bragging rights and self-promotion purposes.
• Instagram is the new high school cafeteria.
• Linkedin is the new water cooler.
• Social Media is both cause and consequence of the epidemic of loneliness coming our way.
• At a risk of sounding like a middle aged conservative curmudgeon, let me tell you this: younger generations have chosen to prolong their peripatetic, single lives under the logic that is it more fun, efficient, cheaper, freer, less complicated and less polluting.
• What they did not foresee was the inner void one confronts when solitude becomes a protracted lifestyle choice.
• After a few years of loneliness and shallow, fleeting relationships, angst and depression ensue.
• Assorted neuroses.
• And hysteria in the most literal Freudian sense of the word (which these days is considered a bit of a taboo): shallow volatile emotions and overdramatic, attention-seeking behavior.
• The kind of conduct so pervasive on social media.

Part 1: