Human are social animals. Our need to connect with each other is as primitive as our instincts to hunt for food, evade predators and find our mates.

We want to believe that by getting more people connected, we’re going to encourage people to learn and understand each other better. This is true for most part, especially for those who already embodied this tenet in their daily lives. I might be wrong, but if we failed to teach people to be good in the real world, can we rely on the internet to do a better job at that?

The need to connect with each other, still, cannot be understated. We now care more about what happens to others on the other side of the globe and understood more about the impact of our decisions to people we will probably never meet. These are all very important progress for humanity as a whole.

However, there are now too many things to care about. With only so much attention a person can give, we are reduced to producing often meaningless content - mainly aimed at maximising the amount of clicks and views.

There is no easy way to navigate this, provided that you’d still consider yourself as part of the communities of the 21st century. Denouncing social media as a whole is rather hypocritical and counter-productive. Social media is just an amalgamation of what the internet was before them - forums, group emails, chats - and you would still end up wasting time finding other ways to connect with others.

As a product driven by social behaviours, it is arguably the most efficient way to connect with other people. Vilifying things we don’t fully understand is just as old as the books and newspapers when they were first invented - and yet, they’re still around.

Perhaps the solution is not to care less. Perhaps it is caring about matters that are actually important to you.