Social Media and Life Balance
Not so long time ago I have struggled with my life balance, now after some months trying to maintain a balance and still trying to optimize some of the elements in my life, I was wondering where Social Media helped me or made things even worse. This is a sneak into a bit of a personal experience. Don’t worry I will not get into that much detail.
My coach told me to draw a graphic indicates where I was and where I am today, so we could see where there could be room for improvements.
This is the picture that came out after we have discussed all the main elements within a balanced life.
Now, one does not need to be a psychologist to find out, I was really quiet high on focusing on my career and with that came the financial high. However, last year it was really on the cost of my health.
In life you have to trade one of the trait for another, meaning you cannot have everything with the highest score. However, the good thing is, a balance can exist.
After having a health issue, people tend to look at what is more important to life. For me it was clearly Family, Health, and Relationship. This is where I need to focus on to lead a more meaningful life.
Let’s look at the role of Social Media on these topics:
Family
I am an expat, where I live right now. My families are all over the world and most of my dearest friends are in another country. With social media I could keep up with them and share happenings and picture through Facebook, which is why I tend to use Facebook quite privately.
On the picture above, you can see that Family has been steady or at balance, if you will, on this graphics.
Without social media, I guess the family situation would rather be on the lower side of the table.
Why is it then not on the top you might ask? Well I don’t get to see them a lot personally and that would be even better. Social media is still not a replacement for seeing family in persona.
Friends/Relationship
In difference with the family, friendship and relationship have to be earned and cherish. Don’t get me wrong, regardless, your family loves you whatever happens. You are one of them.
One would think that with social media maintaining a personal relationship is a piece of cake. I personally think this is not the case. It is really hard to keep up a friendship or relationship based on social media. Of course you can build up a huge number of acquaintances, however, I do make a difference between acquaintances and friendship. They are not the same and that’s why we have different terms to define them.
I do have to admit that social media was the media where I tried to maintain my friendships because I lack time to see them personally. Luckily, there are still phones and/or skype and of course cars to visit them once in a while.
Health
Here is where I do really see less impact of social media at the moment. Yes of course, I have been reading some blogs about life balance or have seen some warnings about hazardous foods etc. .And some are really keen on publishing their health score through their wearables (wearable technology), however, this hasn’t really made any difference to optimizing my health situation.
Career
Oh yes business social media has boosted the possibilities of my career, better said, how I got the company’s attention. Ever since I was on platform as linkedIn or XING the jobs or companies found me and not vice versa. On the other hand companies had the possibility to be credible through these kinds of platform and one gets to know more information ‚behind the scene’.
Here is where you can ‚market‘ yourself and build up a strong network that would be very helpful towards your career.
Finance
I cannot really think of any direct impact of social media to any financial situation with the exception of getting my career on track. Of course if you look at ratings of people (power of the crowd) on different insurance or bank offerings, to make your own decision which institute you decide for then yes. However these things would not really play a large role on how to balance my life, isn’t it?
Home
Almost every visual social media has influenced me setting up my home. I am quiet addicted to Pinterest myself. I’m quiet happy about how I build my home and it’s a place of comfort, my retreat.
In any way the visual social media helps me with my creativity on creating cakes or working on some furnitures. These creative work helped me a lot to find that balance to my daily work. Creating something with your hands can be so powerful for your well being – at least to me. One way you could see the outcome physically and second you are building a whole ‚product‘ from start to the end. This is something you barely have in an office work.