Social media is something that you have a love hate relationship with. You can hardly live without it, but you realize how much of your life you waste away on things like Facebook,Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, and more.
There have been studies done lately that describe how social media actually makes a person feel more isolated and discontented about life than if they weren’t to spend all of their time on it comparing themselves to the picture perfect illusions that other people make their lives out to be.
Despite the fact that there is an obvious limit to how much time a person should be spending on social media sites, there are some really random reasons social media is something to be thankful for. Here’s why:
You Get Information Easy
Whether you’re catching up on all the drama and gossip your friends in high school are still putting themselves through, or if you’re just curious to see how everybody responded to the game last night, you don’t have to go to any site other than a social networking site, and you’ll be caught up on all the information in the world…it might not be the most important stuff that is going on, but it will be what the entire world is focusing on.
You Can Ask For Referrals
If you’ve moved to a new town and if you have medical questions or questions about the best bar in town, your greatest resource is social media. Send out a status or a tweet asking people what they think about (x information) and you’ll get replies pretty instantly from various people, explaining their opinions on the matter. Some people are more credible than others, but you take it where you can get it.
You Can See How Your Old Acquaintances Have Aged
Let’s just be real. Facebook and Twitter are most useful for the fact that you can keep tabs on people you used to know in high school or college. You can easily see where they are now, you can judge them for their job, their husband or wife, their looks, their weight, their house, their kids, and anything else they put up for the world to see.
It’s not necessarily kind, but you can’t pretend you don’t do it…
You Can Kill Time
Despite the fact that social media sucks time away from your life, this can actually be used to your advantage. When you’re in the car or waiting in a line for hours at a time, social media helps keep you entertained. You don’t have to sit in the airport waiting for your flight so bored you think you’ll explode. With the simple tap of an app, the world is opened up to you to waste time stalking and browsing the profiles of people you know or would like to get to know.
You Can Meet the Love of Your Life
If you met your spouse over an online forum, you can attest to the fact that social media is great for relationships and dating. The pool is infinite, and since people follow everyone and make friends with people they’ve never met, it makes it so that you could meet the love of your life via social networking. That’s pretty nifty.
Social media is by no means limited to these things and you can be thankful it’s around for many other reasons. The most important thing is to remember that it’s all a facade. Your happiness is not determined by how many likes or retweets you get on a photo. Live your life. Unplug from the drama, and enjoy the people close to you.