With all of the controversy going on with Facebook these days, I took some time to reflect on my current use of all social media and how using the media can impact my day and, ultimately, my life. 
 
I am not an avid user of social media. I check comments on stories or photos that I occasionally share and skim through posts of family and friends to catch up on news.

I wish my friends and extended family a "Happy Birthday" while learning who recently passed on (I'll be 60 this year so that number is growing), who had another grand-baby, and who is visiting who and where. I think my greatest connection is with those with whom I attended high school and college. 
 
Still, I hear examples of people who practically live on social media. It must be true just seeing some of the posts on Facebook.

I know that just the time I take on social media easily turns an hour into two or three and that the news and stories I have uncovered during those visits have done nothing to make me a better person, nothing to help me pursue my goals or to interact with my family; no, it has become a trap that causes me to share or reply in comments to stories that reflect on other people's ignorance, stupidity, or outright lies.

You know, those types of examples that build people up and encourage them in their pursuits and dreams – NOT! 
 
I read the hate, the fear, the ignorance, and the apathy regarding others only to find those same people becoming offended when someone else in the string claims they are as equally fill-in-the-blank (insensitive, racist, stupid, ignorant) as those they have commented on. 
 
I have said in other posts that civility is gone in our society. Civility has declined following the rise of social media where people now think that because they have a platform to vent that it is acceptable to be trashy, hateful, publicly ignorant, and arrogant enough to be proud of it.

Before social media, engaging others required a level of respect just to earn the right to be heard. Now, like the citizens of Rome being desensitized to the "games" in the Coliseum where animals and people were killed for sport, we as a society have lost that respect for others and for ourselves. 
 
We need a break from all of it. My family knows how to reach me in an emergency. My real friends will continue to be my friends whether I "like" their post of eating a seven-pound hamburger or the resulting gastro-intestinal disorder resulting from it. 
 
Here is my challenge: select a 48-hour boycott of all social media; spend that time doing something that will benefit you, lift your spirits, reconnecting with real friends, helping a neighbor, or just resting from the world to reset your mind, body, and emotions. The trash will still be there when you get back.