I can teach you how YOU can use social media without allowing social media to use YOU in return.
Let me preface this by saying: I love my mum and I’m always going to be on her side. That’s a son’s job. This story is purely anecdotal. I am not a scientist, just perhaps an unqualified social scientist of sorts conducting my own personal experiments.
About 10 years ago we were building the hotel and my mother wasn’t exactly the most pleasant throughout the process. This to me could’ve been for a myriad of reasons as the list of variables is long: stress, new home, building a hotel, unknown financial outcomes, etc. I decided to chill and give space and love because that’s what we Tongans do… Faka’ofa!
Until one day I logged into her Facebook and noticed that the “Timehop” feature was constantly feeding her old memories and nostalgic posts. “Happier times,” so to speak. I was livid.
Now my mother is a nostalgic Pisces at the best of times, so of course she’s going to start longing for those “happier” moments while stuck in the stress of building a hotel. This is understandable. This is normal. We cannot fault humans for behaving like humans. We are mostly just walking blood bags full of emotions after all.
Suddenly her behaviour started making sense to me.
Social media was keeping her emotionally anchored in the past, which meant she was struggling to adapt to the present. So you know what I did? I turned all that shit off. Every “blast from the past” feature, every nostalgia trap, gone. Because I could see it was genuinely affecting her behaviour.
And you know what happened?
She became more present. More engaged. More pleasant to be around. She stopped waking up every morning and having nostalgia rubbed into her face before she’d even had breakfast and a morning cup of tea! Suddenly without all of this social media nonsense, my mother returned back to normal.
Until, in my opinion, big tech pulled their usual shady bullshit again.
Because I swear these companies know they can’t really get to me directly through a screen because I’m educated (thank you TCMS degree from Texas A&M University), so instead they get inside the heads of the people around me. I’m telling you, these companies are anecdotally evil.
And then it happened again.
My mother and I have had a strained relationship for a while now and I finally got to the bottom of why. I explained to her that the family dynamic often feels like I’m being punished for failing to meet people’s unexpressed expectations of who they think I should be.
To put it simply: people have an idea in their head of where I “should” be at this stage of my life, but they never actually communicate those expectations out loud. They are implied expectations, not explicit ones.
And because I operate on explicit communication rather than silent implication, I end up getting punished for rules nobody actually said out loud.
I told her I was sick of it. Sick of constantly feeling bad about myself because I wasn’t measuring up to fantasies and timelines that only existed in other people’s heads.
Then my mother admitted something important.
She admitted that sometimes she compares me to other people my age and where they are in life.
Okay. Great. Thank you for admitting that. I forgive you and I want to move forward.
Now, one must wonder: where do you think she’s seeing all these “other people”? The one’s whose lives she’s using as some sort of invisible litmus test for her own son’s worth?
Facebook.
Can you believe that?
My mother is sitting there feeling bad about her son because an algorithm is psychologically manoeuvring her into feeling that way.
And this is not natural, by the way.
In the animal kingdom, without the internet and social media, you would never even know what half these people were doing with their lives because you’d never see them. You wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t exist in your immediate reality.
But now you’re being confronted with carefully curated highlight reels every single day through a screen and suddenly you’re comparing yourself. Comparing your children. Comparing your life. Comparing your happiness.
And then feeling like shit.
You are not naturally waking up and feeling bad about yourself.
You are waking up, opening an app called “Depression / Comparison / Thief of Joy,” and allowing it to set the emotional tone for your entire day.
Then you sit there marinating in thoughts about how shitty everything is when you literally live a good life. A life plenty would kill for! All because your son isn’t a doctor. Or doesn’t have children yet. Or somehow he doesn’t have the perfect life you imagined for him. Wondering what you must have done wrong as a parent.
This isn’t something you naturally feel, this is something you are being manipulated into feeling.
And then people with very little awareness of how these algorithmic systems work start spiralling.
This lack of awareness is not their fault! It’s not like anybody’s teaching Social Media Awareness videos online, and even if they were, do you think Facebook or Instagram would be allowing them to go viral? Of course not. It’s in their best interests for you to keep scrolling so you can feel shitty about yourself so you go out and do more shopping to buy more shit you don’t need. More commercialism, more consumerism, blah blah blah.
We don’t teach these classes in high school, although maybe we should be?
I don’t blame my mother.
I blame social media.
I blame the lack of education around what these platforms are actually doing to people psychologically without them even realizing.
So here are my rules for protecting your spirit, your energy, and your etheric body while using social media.
Rule Number 1: DO NOT FUCKING SCROLL
Scrolling is where they get you.
Scrolling is anxiety inducing. Pay attention to the feeling in your body next time you do it. It gives me this pit in my stomach feeling and not in a good way. More like a nervous “I don’t know what awful thing I’m about to see next” type of feeling.
Scrolling feels like programming.
I can’t prove it scientifically, but something about the constant up and down eye movement combined with the placement of content feels psychologically suggestive to me.
We already know side to side eye movement affects REM states and memory processing. So what does endless vertical scrolling do?
Rule Number 2: BE DELIBERATE
If you are going online, be deliberate about what you choose to consume.
You are the captain of your own brain. You are the one operating the command centre.
Do not let these Silicon Valley cunts ruin your day.
And the best way to stop them ruining your day is to become extremely intentional about what enters your field of vision.
Go directly to specific people’s pages if you want to see their content. Do not sit passively on the home feed waiting for the algorithm to decide what emotional state you should be in today.
Even on Instagram stories, be deliberate. Skip through intentionally. The second it gets to ads or random algorithmic suggestions, close the app.
Do not give the programming machine the opportunity to decide what your eyes consume.
Rule Number 3: START ASKING QUESTIONS
When you see something online that suddenly makes you feel weird, insecure, angry, anxious, jealous, or inadequate, stop and ask yourself why that particular piece of content was shown to you.
Because these platforms control almost everything you see.
Nothing is random anymore. You have to be more discerning.
You already need to read three different sources just to get somewhere close to the truth on most topics, and even then you’re still reading between the lines half the time.
So when something repeatedly appears on your timeline and it’s affecting your emotional state, start questioning it.
Rule Number 4: THREE STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT
If I see three disturbing things online in one day, I disconnect completely.
Non negotiable.
I am not poisoning my etheric body with Silicon Valley CIA psychological warfare bullshit and neither should you.
Protect your brain.
Protect your nervous system.
Protect your spirit.
USE SOCIAL MEDIA.
DO NOT ALLOW SOCIAL MEDIA TO USE YOU.
