By Jasmine Ryan @JasmineRyanTAFE
The online world has caused a divide between human connections in the real world. In situations where we feel bored or have nothing to do our natural human instincts would be to talk to somebody either next to us or start up a conversation with a total stranger, to read a book or the newspaper or to simply sit and connect with … ourselves. Instead we are navigating straight towards our phones, as if it has become apart of our natural human instincts. Slowly we are losing connections with both ourselves and each other.
I began to notice this problem in society and then I noticed it within myself. Our phones allow us to ‘stay connected’ but also cut off connections in other parts of our lives. For instance when we catch public transport. Hundreds of people sit next to each other each day, a different stranger everyday. Out of how many people we sit next to each time we catch the train or bus, do we actually greet and have a conversation with. Instead we are most likely on our phones, and so are all the people around us. Although we may be talking to people through our phones and staying connected, we disregard and cut off our surroundings, creating a bubble around ourselves. Cutting off our connections to those people around us.
Society is beginning to adapt a new way of socialising, unintentionally. Instead of putting ourselves out there we are choosing to keep the online world as our barrier, our shield of protection from self doubt. What this barrier creates is a loss in real life human interaction which then in turn, losing touch with ourselves.
We can create a kind of alternate persona online, as it’s so easy to do. When we create a new profile online it asks us who we are. For some, we don’t actually completely know who we are or are not happy with who we are as a person. This online world gives us the opportunity to create someone we want to be or can’t be in reality. It creates a forefront. But what it can also do is cause us to become lost with who we truly are in reality. We make ourselves out to be this way online but then in reality we don’t know who we are but also don’t know how to be that person we perceive online. This causes more comfort living in the online world through a profile we created. But in the end we are never able to truly find who we are as a person. It has almost become a 3 dimensional world between reality, fantasy and online.
We need to put down the devices and give ourselves a small break to have a moment with both ourselves and with others. We need to enable ourselves with the ability to learn about ourselves. In a state of mind where we feel vulnerable is also the state where we are able to learn so much about ourselves, our hopes, our dreams, our fears.
We must remember to live in the moment and to be aware of our surroundings. There is so much love and beauty both in the world and the people in it. The more we teach ourselves to acknowledge the people around us, we will always be aware. We can teach ourselves to live in a world again where our natural human instinct is to say hello and ask someone how they are and genuinely mean it.
