With social media everything is at our fingertips. Yes! We can learn almost anything about anyone, there’s science, the arts, and love.  We have endless opinions to sift through, and a forever continuing stream of consciousness right in front of us and it’s all a click away. We’ve won! We did it.

Yet at the same time we have nothing. We’re binded to our devices. Never to be free from them. No longer is the true human experience. Relationships have morphed into sharing a smile in person and telling your deepest secrets online. None of it is real anymore. There’s an ache inside all of us to be freed from it. An ache that will never be soothed–especially as long as schools continue to utilize social media.

Social media is cyclical. Students go on the internet and are left with an empty feeling from every other aspect of their life. If we continue to be tied to social media throughout school, there’s no doubt students will find other ways to use it to fill the void. They will find obsessions that pull them away from the real world until their truest identity exists only online. This pulls away from the joy of a real human experience. An experience that schools should be pushing their students to find. 

In an effort to find freedom, a student might delete Instagram. But then they won’t know when the next Sustainability Club meeting is. This is a club they found through social media. They know what’s happening in the club without even attending a single meeting because it’s posted on social media. They can’t delete Instagram now: they need it to know about clubs. 

All the information they would have learned is right in front of them, erasing the true human experience. They show up to the club as an expert on who is there and what they’re doing. There’s no point in going through life knowing what you’re doing before you do it. Life is about making mistakes, and with social media removing that, it becomes inauthentic. Useless. They’ll never create unbiased emotional connections, and learn about the world from a teacher that has spent their life studying it. They instead ache to feel fulfilled by even the most basic of human activities of joining a new group. 

Something is horribly wrong, but students, through no fault of their own, are addicted. Most students push social media as much as possible in an effort to find the good that must exist in the void they feel. They deny the fact that what’s on social media is meaningless by posting about the most serious aspects of life, but this only expands the void. If we take school and put it into social media, it just makes everything we do more empty. It converts our clubs and sports into a series of posts that become meaningless. Students have converted real memories into manufactured ones to look good on social media. 

Social media seemed like a good idea in the 90’s, but as it’s grown, it’s become a constant stream of anything and everything that it has inevitably lost it’s desire, and become nothing. The whole world is in the palm of our hands, but it’s never enough: it’s dust.