Travelling, Happiness & the Lack of Social Media

If you are a regular reader of Something Decent you would be excused for thinking that I had disappeared off the face of the earth over the span of the past month due to the fact that this website hasn’t been updated, nor has there been much information on the Eurno project – other than vital actions which were required for the safe guarding of the project as a whole.

In this modern world full of complete interconnectivity and everyone watching your every move, I personally feel a digital cleanse is not only good for us but required in order to maintain a healthy mental state, and remind us all of what is important in life. It is for this reason that my partner and I often embark on adventures in the wilderness be-it for a weekend, a week or a month.

I feel that the current state of society means that human beings have become extremely detached from what we actually are – animals – and that this is a major factor in the steep rise in mental illnesses such as depression becoming so prevalent in today’s societies around the world.

As you will no doubt know already, I am extremely opposed to companies such as Facebook (hence the lack of an official Facebook page for Eurno or Something Decent) due to the negative implications which I personally feel that they have on us as human beings – they fuel this strange culture of comparing ourselves to the Jones’s constantly by force feeding us the highlights of peoples’ lives, the parts of their lives which they want you to see.

It is for that reason I urge all readers of this website to take some time and try a digital cleanse. It may sound like something extreme but ask yourself: why is it such an extreme proposition all of a sudden? I was born in a world where phones were fixed to a landline and the internet didn’t exist. Further to that, even during my teen years through the early 2000’s the internet was something which most people had no clue about yet, all of a sudden, it has become the fabric of society.

When I tell people I do not use any social media other than for business (even then I make a post and log out) I get looked at like I have just kicked someone’s elderly mother in the neck. This is a problem in my opinion. With people being born into this world and having social media rammed down their neck from birth I feel it is extremely important to remind people of the fact that it was only within the past 15 years that Facebook was created and that we managed just fine before it.

Maybe this is just a rant from a semi old-fashioned person, maybe it is the opinion of someone who is concerned about the future generations of humans, take it as you will but ask yourself why do we need to be connected with all these people which we have never met all the time? What are we scared of as a society? Why is it considered so strange to want to spend a period of time getting back to nature and feeling human?

If you have never been camping without any mobile phone etc I urge you to try it out and see if you feel calmer and generally more human at the end of it. Yes we all enjoy the ability to watch Netflix at will but everything has its limits and we need to realise that the latest episode of Love Island is not the be all and end all of our life.

Happiness.

Original link: https://somethingdecent.co.uk/blog/my-two-pence/travelling-happiness-the-lack-of-social-media/