Life Between 0 and 1

I’ve reached an age where I can objectively handle pretty much anything.  This gives me an ability to let most things just pass without much thought.  Such as someone getting mad over a decision that gets made, getting passed over for a promotion or something as simple as negative perceptions.  It’s when presented with these life situations that you gain valuable experience.  As the graphic so perfectly puts it, experience alters your attitude and it has nothing to do with age.  I’ve met individuals that have been expertly mature that are in their 20’s.

This objectivity helped me reach a conclusion regarding social media.  As those that have followed me, I deleted my 10-year-old Facebook account last year.  I recently just deleted my Twitter account as well.  At this point, I do not have any “active” social media accounts.  Ones that may still exist I just never went back to delete and are most likely already gone for lack of use.  Social media, in my experience, gives the user a distorted view of the world around them.  They quickly become addicted to social media other real life non-social media skills start to fade or become awkward.

What is scary is the absolute dependence on social media 20-somethings and younger show.  So dependent that there are measurable delays in development into adulthood.  Jean M. Twenge at The Atlantic wrote Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation that goes into serious detail on this fact.  It’s rather long, but definitely worth the read if you have younger children that are close or have already received smartphones.  Social media is just one of the many symptoms that can be traced back to an uncontrollable addiction.

Overall maturity with most individuals, through smartphones or social media, has declined.  It’s going to make it much more difficult to keep the jobs filled needed to keep our country going.