The news given by the newspaper has surprised in Brazil The Globe days ago by Fernanda Alves, according to whom young people are beginning to leave aside their passion for social networks to dedicate their free time to other activities such as reading, learning new languages or exercising outdoors.
The news, which includes a series of personal experiences and statements from psychologists and psychiatrists, is even more surprising because from the beginning, when Orkut appeared, Brazil was one of the countries in the world that most supported this application and which quickly reached even the least educated people.
The success of the first social networks that spread quickly in Brazil was explained by the fact that it is one of the countries in the world where people like to communicate even without knowing each other. They confess in public without shame and with the greatest naturalness in the world.
It was precisely this characteristic of Brazilians, of all the categories that enjoy telling their lives to others as an impulse to communication, which contrasts, for example, with the Anglo-Saxon and even Spanish privacy, that shocked me the most when I landed in Brazil 20 years ago. When after a while here I passed by the newspaper’s editorial office in Madrid, I told one of the secretaries of the management that in Brazil if you sit on a bench next to a person waiting for the bus, the most likely thing is that he will immediately start a conversation and end up telling you about his life and miracles. The secretary responded as if horrified: “For God’s sake, I don’t want anyone to tell me about their life!”
One morning on a crowded bus, a middle-aged woman stood up and began to talk to herself out loud: “I am happy,” she said. She proudly explained that she had managed to get a small house of her own, that her two daughters were studying and that she was healthy. And almost shouting, she exclaimed: “How could I not be happy!” Nobody laughed. It seemed perfectly normal.
It is true that reactionary Bolsonarism has largely soured relations between people, sowed hatred and distrust, and the “God bless you” that people once exchanged when they met on the street has vanished. What prevails is fear or disinterest. And people had taken refuge in the tangle of social networks that devoured all their free hours and more, even those of sleep.
Hence the surprise of the news that many young Brazilians, for the first time, are beginning to break away from the slavery of the networks to dedicate their free time to freeing themselves in search of new activities that, rather than alienating them, will free them.
The newspaper report The Globe The blog, which collected various experiences of young people who are leaving the purely recreational and sometimes enslaving spaces of the networks for other more traditional and liberating activities, spoke with psychologist Fabiola Luciano, a specialist in cognitive behavioral therapy, who explained that this new trend should be seen as positive. She explains that “the feelings that social networks cause are difficult to manage, since they encourage feelings of inferiority, constant comparison with winners, inadequacy, anxiety and difficulty in valuing one’s own achievements.”
This beginning of young people abandoning the networks in search of other alternatives for their free time is not easy here in Brazil, a strongly communicative and cordial society, and in some ways exhibitionist of its own feelings. In fact, despite these examples of young people seeking to free themselves from the slavery of the networks, starting with the youngest who are looking at their cell phones even on a motorcycle at full speed, in Brazil, the time spent on the networks by young people is growing every day. It has gone from 66.1% to 87.2%.
All the scientific research on the excessive use of the networks and its consequences on brain and nervous activity can lead, as is appearing in the most serious academic and medical studies, to people ending up without time to reflect on their own lives, to be in contact with nature, to devote some time to pure meditation and reflection. And also to reflect on the trials and anxieties of life itself, in which it is of little or no use to let ourselves be carried away by the mirage of showing only our best and most festive face.
We are made of clay, of divine and human. We are a mixture of gods and demons, of light and darkness. We are a boiling cauldron of divine and human feelings, better than we think. However, the mirages of the networks that disguise us as what we are not are of no use. This appears above all in moments of meditation, silence, reading and reflection, of encounter with ourselves.
The networks are a formidable instrument for new cultural and scientific conquests, and they may end up changing our living and working habits, but with all their flashes of light and illusions they will never be able to whisper in our ears what we really are and what is worthy of being embraced or thrown away. Only the sonorous solitude and silent music of the mystics of the past will reveal this to us.
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