Don't Forget How to Have Holidays

Or: radical ignorance.

Holidays and social media seem inherently at odds.

Nothing feels less intimate, memorable, and festive than refreshing your timeline for the one-billionth time. I’m always trying to curb my social media usage, but I find an unusual strength of will to succeed at staying offline during the holidays.

The outrage of the day, forgettable memes, and reading-comprehension-impaired comments feel especially uninteresting during holidays.

The way social media mixes with holidays like oil mixes with water is important. Scrolling through social media yanks me out of the present moment and suspends me in a cyber limbo built by attention-span-abusing media.

I snap out of my screen-induced trance to look up at the physical reality around me, feeling detached and disoriented, like a recovering amnesiac. While this ritual is always unpleasant, the self-destructive element of performing it during time-constrained events like Christmas is too obvious to ignore.

There’s an important truth in what social media is and does to us with the unbearable emptiness of distraction it creates.