Are any of us living in the same reality anymore?

Are any of us living in the same reality anymore?

Social media was supposed to open the world to us. Instead it has closed our minds and is shrinking our world with every scroll.

We now have a socializing issue. We have retreated into the solitary comfort of our phones. Scrolling is easier than showing up to potentially uncomfortable situations. We call it “decompressing,” but between the makeup tutorials are rage-bait clips engineered to trigger fight-or-flight. This repetitive, divisive content seeps into our subconscious. Before long, the algorithm owns our attention and warps our sense of truth. Hyper-personalized feeds reward fear and confirmation bias. We sort ourselves into echo chambers and write people off over single issues.

Social media is eroding the civic identity of my generation.

In college, I loved sitting on the couch with my friends while we had long, messy conversations about reality. We lived together through Covid, BLM protests, a Trump and a Biden presidency, and a slew of personal ups and downs. We shared experiences, talked about the news, checked each other, and found lots of common ground. After graduation, distance pushed us onto our phones, and suddenly we were all living in different realities. Different algorithms. Different sets of “truth.” With less face-to-face time, nuance disappeared. Intention got lost through the screen. As we tried to navigate this, my mental health suffered, so I disengaged from civic topics with my peers entirely.

That’s a huge civic loss. And my story isn’t unique.

There’s a way back: get in the same room.

Fighting back against big tech is important, but I am choosing to use my energy differently. Not pushing for better algorithms, but for investment in real, face-to-face connection. I promise you, young-person to young-person, there’s an alternative to the scroll. Join a new club, try a new sport, go do your work in a coffee shop and compliment that girl’s crocheted sweater. There are spaces where we can reconnect with one another not on Instagram DMs. When we see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices, the distortions fade and our shared humanity is undeniable.

Civic work has always been hard. But it’s impossible when we live in different digital worlds.

So this week: Go to that party. Invite that old friend that you think you are “too different from” to coffee. We may just find out we’re not so different than we think.