My thoughts on Facebook

Social Media a.k.a Facebook has significance in our life in many ways.

We are connected to our friends and family in less than a click. Whenever we want, we can send a message to them. We can witness their achievements, photos, and life events even without being there. However, every good thing in our life comes with many other not so good things.

Social media can get troublesome if that exposes you to your employer in ways you don’t like. I don’t have my co-workers on Facebook, but the director of my team knows that I have a food blog. So I need to be careful about what I post.
Sometimes we are so engrossed in social media, that we forget the ones who are close by. We can spend millions of hours on Facebook, but we forget to check if a friend is doing well. We never find time to meet someone over coffee but still like his or her social status on Facebook We are forgetting to wish our loved ones on their birthdays if Facebook doesn’t remind us of it.

There are sometimes we absolutely disagree with someone’s post on Facebook, but just to avoid a political battle or a detailed conversation we just hit “like” and leave.

I am part of some Facebook groups. Sometimes other group members challenge my boundaries to excel. We all learn by constructive criticism, but if those opinions overpower us – problems start. At the end of the day we forget what we want to achieve. We have only one life and it is not possible to listen to everyone and make all of them happy.

A couple of days back a friend was asking me – “Would you be here if you did not have social media? Would your work improve? Would you challenge yourself?” I thought for a couple of days. If I were not on Facebook would I really challenge my boundaries?

Perhaps not!

It’s not possible for a single person to know everything just by looking things up on Google. But when you are on Facebook, you see other photographers are doing something and you want to push your boundaries. I gave an example of something that attracts me. You can find similar examples about something you love.

I also come to know about many global issues and news through Facebook, as I have liked several Facebook pages of news organizations.

It definitely helps to know and improve yourself. But as I just said, every great thing in life comes with a million other bad things. You need to learn what to take and what to discard. My mother always reminded me of one of our religious reformers who taught us to be like a swan, which, from a mixture of milk and water can only drink the milk and discard the water. It was Ramakrishna Paramhansa who taught us the swan analogy. “Paramhansa” originates from swan because he took the good parts of our religion and discarded the rest.