Accepting the phenomenon of LinkedIn loneliness

You did it again and you hate yourself for it.

You just checked your Facebook app on the phone and saw something that briefly made you raise one eyebrow. Then the self-loathing returned and you put down the phone.

I was glad to have warded off loneliness last year by limiting time spent on social media. Studies evidently support this now widely reported fact: Using social media too often and for too long makes you lonely.

I felt I was wasting too much time on social media at the halfway point (or was it sooner?) of 2018. It’s now been awhile, but I recall I first removed the Facebook app from my phone. This actually had the two-fold benefit of minimizing my carpal tunnel by not checking the phone as often while simultaneously leaving me with less feelings of loneliness.

It’s an interesting world we live in when something called social media is anything but and found to be responsible for high levels of loneliness.

That does pretty much come with the turf; spending 8+ hours a day in front of a screen tends to be isolating. Imagine that.

The world and how it works are pretty foreign to most people on any given day. That’s because we’re hanging out on social media. And I’d like to see some justice and have social media rebranded as “Only The Lonely” in an homage to Roy Orbison.

As our ability to interact with others decreases the more time we spend in front of screens, so does our ability to be our most effective, functioning and authentic selves.

Studies have shown this or that and/or it and other distillates of minutia related to detail.

They also have demonstrated lots of things to put it in other words. Aside from bullet point discoveries, however, solutions to the issues identified by studies are largely lacking.

In the case of the host of problems that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (yes, it’s social media, too, just social media for professionals) pose regarding loneliness, what are the solutions? Is there hope?

Sometimes I think the reason I’m even on LinkedIn is because crazily enough I sometimes feel that being on a network utilized by professionals should lessen my feelings of loneliness. Why would any reasonable person feel otherwise?

Like hanging out where professionals are hanging out should make loneliness nonexistent. Right?

[I don’t particularly care for it when someone says something and then punctuates it with, “Right?” So, I guess I just didn’t like myself there.]

I do find myself wondering how can professionals be lonely? It’s as if there is no good reason to be linked in and lonely on LinkedIn. Again, it’s used by professionals or at least it’s advertised this way. But the other side of the coin is that (to me) being LinkedIn means being connected with someone and something more than just yourself.

I think I could become professionally lonely if I cruised the LinkedIn professional networking site for too long.

It’s not just me, though, who feels this way.

People finish school, go into the working world and realize the reality of life is not all it’s cracked up to be.

So what do they do?

You guessed it. They go on LinkedIn to look for another job that hopefully makes them less lonely.

Can I get a like?

I didn’t think so.