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Death by a Thousand Tweets (Avoiding Despair on Social Media)

I’ve started to believe that social media is slowly killing us.

I think it’s killing us one Tweet at a time.

I sense our hearts are all slowly bleeding out.

There was a time (not that long ago) when you’d come across a headline or read a news report informing you of a tragedy happening somewhere in the world. You would see it once and be informed and moved, and you’d begin to process your grief and craft a fitting response to it all. The burden of the story was real—but it was proportional.

But now, each headline or news report is immediately (sometimes simultaneously) accompanied by a few hundred or even a few thousand people’s version of the same story flooding into our timelines and news feeds. People may be relaying their shock or lamenting the damage or questioning the implications; perhaps providing follow-up stories or acting as reporters—but the net result is that we are now awash in multiplied devastation and sadness. We’ve been thrust into perpetual urgency because this single bit of very bad news has been so magnified by the real estate it is given. Every notification raises our heart rates and our sense of doom and ushers in a growing sense of hopelessness.

And this happens over and over and over a thousand times a day—with every shooting, every horrible political maneuver, every terrorist attack, each bit of death and destruction. It all gets repeated and repeated; the same bit of horror coming to us in a hundred different forms: as news links, op-ed pieces, memes, blogs, and personal commentary. And as these atrocities and injustices become all that is trending in our heads—abject despair is certain. There is little chance of finding any light in that thick blackness.

The general rise in depression and anxiety in America, and in people reaching out for pastoral and mental health care since the Inauguration is certainly due in large part to the reality of what we’ve been subjected to. (In many cases things are actually fairly terrible and grief is indeed warranted.) But a good deal of that sadness and the accompanying mental stress it yields, comes from having these things exponentially multiplied each day, from the moment our eyes open until they close for the final time. And it’s all waiting there for us in the morning: the notifications and the RT requests and appeals to act—and the growing choir of the devastated singing loudly back to us at how dire it all is. 

To save our lives and our sanity and our everyday existence, we may all need to step away so that we can have the unpleasant information right sized again in our heads and hearts; so that we can give other things equal voice, so that we can have a little of the over-saturation of social media sadness offset by tangible moments of laughter and intimacy and peace. From time to time we all need to be reminded of the full breadth of this life, of the small moments of unvarnished beauty found with our families and in nature and in community—the things that won’t come screaming through our push notifications. We need to make sure we’re giving the life-affirming things equal time. We need to feel the evening breeze and snuggle our dogs and tickle our kids and eat something amazing—because this too is resistance.

Privilege is the luxury of looking away from injustice and acting as if it is not occurring. This is not that. We have to see the unpleasant things and respond to them in meaningful ways—but we also have to make sure we’re seeing these horrors themselves, and not the massive, distorted shadow cast by repetition.

The monsters are big and scary enough. We shouldn’t help them by magnifying them.

See what’s there that burdens you, but take time to look around and see what else is there: love, laughter, compassion—and people like you, living with grace and goodness in difficult days.

Be encouraged.

 

 

 

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