The digital age has created more opportunities to connect than humanity has ever known, yet the rates of loneliness keep increasing (nearly half the U.S. feels sometimes or always alone). Figuring out how to connect online will maximize our happiness as opposed to passively consuming digital content is vital to your (and America’s) happiness.

Become a creator in a consumer world

We live in a world of consumption. Daily bombarded with hundreds of ads, images, videos looking for our attention. It becomes easy to passively consume and live in a world that is directed by other people.

One of the keys to connect is first recognizing when you are in a passive consumer mindset, and understanding how detrimental that can be. Connection happens through curation, creation, and recreation.

No where is this more prevalent than the internet. With billions of posts, pictures, and videos shared every day, there is just more content than is possible to consume. You can now spend years caught in a internet consumer mindset, without anything to show for it. Consuming other people’s photos and experiences, while not creating and enjoying any of your own. We are meant to create, which is what makes the creations of other people so inspiring. But at some point the digital creativity of others stops inspiring our own creative actions, it’s time to evaluate.

Otherwise you become a consumer of other people’s lives, instead of a creator of your own life.

Inadequacy Digital Marketing

Listening to the book “Story Wars” recently I learned about the concept of inadequacy marketing. This type of marketing focuses on where each of us is incomplete: “too fat”, “too nerdy”, “uneducated”, “uncultured”, “untraveled”, “lonely”. Each of these highlights where we are not whole, not enough, unfulfilled, and then literally capitalizes on our weakness. Inadequacy marketing is all around us and feeds on our insecurities to make a sale.

Once I learned this concept, it changed the way I viewed my experience on the internet – my searches are feeding into the advertisements I’m seeing. Our advertising experiences online are essentially reinforcing our deepest insecurities.

With this in mind it becomes so important to become creators in our spaces online, and aware that much of the marketing is there to highlight our weaknesses, effectively producing disconnection. The internet is not there to create true connections between friends and the world around us unless we are deliberate. We have to take that responsibility on ourselves.

Habit of Connection

How often do you pick up your phone out of habit? Traffic light, waiting in line, work meeting, even on the toilet (you know who you are). No need other than filling a moment out of habit.

Research says that habits like these and many, many others make up more than 40% of our day!

So when we talk about connecting, it is really a question of whether you currently have connection habits, or passive consumption habits. These habits will add up over time and at the end of a life show either growth, creation, connection, or be mostly evidence of living a passive life dictated by others. We will instead of inspiring others be left in an insecure space of habitual consumption.

I talked with one digital marketer and business owner who is counting on these types of habits. He said that he designs his business as if people were “lizards lying lifeless in the sun.” The millions of passive consumers (potentially you and me) in the world are targets for today’s marketers.

Social Media Connection

To disrupt our habits of passive consumption will take effort, but result in a richer life once initiated. Here are some examples of habits to use and start to create and connect online, instead of consume and disconnect:

Comment. Engage with your followers and those you follow. Rather than hearting or liking a post, comment and get curious with your people. Build up others by sharing your positive vibes with them. This may mean taking it to DMs so you can get more personal.

Celebrate. Recognize who has a birthday or good news online today and reach out with a thoughtful message, be a positive force by sharing your genuine admiration. “HBD” or “Congrats!” aren’t a starting place for connection online.

Open Up. Share a current project, question, or insecurity with your network. This openness can be hard but creates the opportunity (and invitation) for others to connect with you.

Have a Purpose. So often we passively open up an app to be entertained. YouTube or Instagram are great escapes from boredom. Avoiding an awkward silence in person, or quiet moment by ourselves is easy with the internet at our fingertips. Try having a purpose or a question when you pick up your phone. It is easy to get lost and lose 15-20 minutes of our life by quickly filling the immediate void. Getting our answer from the internet, and getting back off will add hours and hours to our lives. I can’t count the number of times I’ve picked up my phone without a need only to get lost online for a few minutes.

Log Off Honestly the best strategy may be to get offline certain mediums altogether. If you find your Instagram, YouTube, or other usage is distracting you from truly living and connecting, a reset may be in order. A 2018 study found a positive correlation between increased social media usage and loneliness and depression. The study found that limiting social media use to “approximately 30 minutes a day may lead to significant improvement in well-being.” [1]

Each of these is the exact opposite of some of the prevalent social media habits: wait for others to notice you, quietly consume, digest and creep other people’s feeds, withholding vulnerability, spending lots of time online. Fighting these habits will break down walls and create connection, and even more happiness.

Critic Spiral

Without managing our passive habits of consumption on social media, we become less connected, less confident, and eventually critics of others. Instead of creating and connecting online, our own insecurities begin feeding a need to be critical of the posts or creations of others.

Our relationship with social media and the internet as a whole is an important one, as it will define what kind of life we live. Whether we want to produce and connect online, or sit back and consume the creations of others is up to us. Taking a little effort to connect online can go a long ways in creating meaningful experiences, the choice is up to us.

____________________________

References

1. Melissa G. Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson, Jordyn Young. No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2018; 751 DOI: 10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751