Being in the media I’m on my phone wwwaaayyy more than I should be but it’s required for my work. Sometimes it gets to the end of the day and I physically don’t even want to be anywhere near it and even my eyes get uncomfortable. Social media is a lot of things. It’s amazing in some regards like how Facebook can connect you to people all over the world whether it’s relatives you used to talk to maybe once every couple years, now you have an open and endless line of communication. Instagram is great for sharing, promoting and looking at funny fail videos. I’ll be honest I don’t go down the Twitter rabbit hole too often but it seems like the wild west of angry people voicing their opinions on anything and everything.
Tom Holland the latest actor to play Spiderman for the last 5 years or so took to his social media platforms to say he was deleting his Twitter and Instagram accounts for his mental health. He went on to elaborate that he would find himself getting sucked in and completely spiraling and reading about himself and all the good, bad and somewhere in between of things people had to say about him. He has almost 70 million followers and I can’t imagine what that must be like. I don’t think he’s going down these self obsessed rabbit holes for vanity reasons, but it’s got to be a pretty awful head space to be in when so many people are constantly voicing their opinions on every single thing you do or don’t do. No human being is supposed to have that much attention and it must take a very strong mind to not have it bring you down and weigh heavily on your shoulders. From some of the other celebrities that have the same amount of following a common thread that I hear is the best advice they ever got was to never read the comments on anything they post and that seems to help.
So he’s gone on an indefinite hiatus from social media probably to the ire of studios (less promotion for projects) but for a respectable reason. I wonder if we’ll see more of this as a trend from public figures. Or if they’ll post what they want to post, turn the comments off and immediately switch off. I really believe that social media has 100% added to depression and anxiety. Now I’m not a doctor but it doesn’t take a genius to know that if Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and all the other ones were around when I was 13 years old, I would have totally been out to lunch as a kid.
Time will tell whether we keep diving further in and if people put up their own boundaries with what they share. It all comes down to the person and some people are more cut out for it but it doesn’t make one better than the other.
Over and out.
– Jeremy