Comment by OneMorePerson
20 hours ago
When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.
We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.
I don't know that you can broadly say "religion" I'm not a Buddhist but from my surface level understanding of Buddhism it might be the case that that person needs to save themselves when they have had some negative experiences with social media. (This is overly simplistic I'm not saying its all on the individual but it's hard to summarize this point in only a couple sentences).
I do think there's some people who have fallen into social media bad habits and can fairly easily be helped to correct bad habits, other people seem to go to social media because it actually aligns with who they are. I've met several people (strangers) who seemed like they brought social media behavior into real life in a way that made me think social media gave them a platform for their personality, not the other way around. They were pretty jarring experiences that really stuck with me.
It’s not a small group of people that we can afford to “lose”. It’s widespread in an entire generation (at least), a fact that threatens our society as a whole.