Life needs simplicity more now than ever before. In speaking with parents of young children and watching nightly news, it occurred to me my generation has dealt our children a bad hand when it comes to how much attention we are giving to social media than to what’s happening before our eyes. Are we teaching our children and young adults it’s part of life to express our feeling and opinions in clips, memes and 160 character tweets and to monitor other people’s lives instead of living our own?
Fox News published a statistic this week which astounds me: the average American checks their cell phone 150 times per day. Add to the fact there are a billion phones out there. Distracted and overwhelmed, we go about our day conscientious of what others are doing and not too concerned about ourselves.
While browsing online, I see organized closets and beautifully landscaped gardens which, if I chose to allow it to happen, could make me feel guilty about my disorganization and overgrown azaleas. Once again, I’m excited and inspired by someone else’s accomplishments posted on social media. This is not a bad thing. But what it can be is time consumed while unproductive, dreaming about projects in which I haven’t made a priority.
My point is this: are we so very addicted to technology we can’t spend enough time being unplugged to brainstorm about our work, family and projects to do something different? Are we placing such pressure on ourselves to be the perfect wife, mother, daughter, boss, employee and bombarding ourselves with images we only hope to create in our own lives? This type of behavior will be reflected in our children if they feel stress brought on by our drive for perfection for their lives: birthday parties with gourmet cupcakes, structured play dates with constructed crafts and games, and extra curricular activities every night of the week. We read and see everyone else’s ideas and aspirations and leave simplicity behind. We don’t typically share every true and real aspect of our lives online.
It’s similar to what my grandmother used to call “Sunday faces” where you never let your true emotions show at church on Sunday morning. Everything is always great when you arrived and you never let your feelings show. We know now this aspect of society was not healthy. However, now we put on our Sunday faces whenever we’re on social media.
Technology is great, but it should have its place. The convenience of our hand held computers is wondrous and astounding, but we should not give it higher priority than the people we love and respect most. We can’t allow aspirations and opinions to cause guilty feelings if we’re not living in a palatial compound, eating artificial sweeteners, or our 5 year-old isn’t speaking a second language. We should educate ourselves to make good decisions and have people we trust give us sound advice, which is how culture is passed on, but we should never allow any addiction to rule our lives and ignore what’s happening front and center.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: There’s something to be said for simplicity