Daily Times

Sir: We eat, we sleep, we check social media, we repeat … without realising that it isn’t real. It has become a habit for us to pick up our phones and logon to our social media profiles immediately after waking up.

We mindlessly scroll through hundreds of posts. We comment, we react, we ‘like’ and we ‘share’. Many of us prefer not to think of the disadvantages of social media, because of how dependent we are on it as a form of entertainment – a way to kill boredom.

For many of us, it is an unknown addiction

Although we jokingly admit that we can’t get enough of Instagram or Facebook, we sometimes don’t realise how much we need to look through our phones to fulfil the little hole inside us. According to a recent survey by the Royal Society for Public Health in the United Kingdom, social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol.

Just imagine you smoked as much as you checked your feed. Are we truly aware of how many times a day we pick up our phones to look at other people’s perfectly curated online life?

IBRAHIM CHALGARI HUB

Hub Chowki

Published in Daily Times, January 23^rd 2019.