Sucked In By The Socials

The Chapel News

Sucked In By The Socials

19 Nov 2021

For a long time now I've been noticing my rollercoaster relationship with social media. I've swung from enjoying finding individuals that seem curious and have a different perspective on life to later finding the same individuals to be frozen in time and stuck with opinions and views that don't change. In fact, they seem more and more intent on bringing people onto their 'side'.

I've also lost so much time skipping through endless pictures and words looking for some sort of inspiration. Sometimes I'd hit upon a nugget but most often I'd lose those minutes, and even hours, of my life just watching other people's lives from the outside.

Speaking with others I hear more often how women are drawn into their phones by some sort of desire to find something valuable in its stream of content. They want to feel something. Yet all that happens is they end up feeling empty. The wanting doesn't go away and the 'hit' of satisfaction from stumbling upon a nugget gets harder to find. But we can't seem to wean ourselves off this system.

Humans are naturally social and so we seek connection with others but social media offers us just surface-level snapshots. We don't fully interact using these platforms and instead what we see triggers our comparisons, judgements, unconscious patterns and biases as we are left to fill in the blanks. Life on the screen is never real or as rich as it is in person and whilst we know this when we use social media we can't help still yearning for more. As a result of feeling all this in myself, I've decided to take the socials of my own phone so that I won't get lost in that world anymore.

Now, more than ever, real human bonds matter most. We've all learnt how much it means to us to be seen and heard and to be able to look into someone's eyes and properly connect. In an industry that's about looks, at The Chapel we have always understood that what makes the real difference to what we do is not just how we cut hair but how we make our guests feel. That's why it feels like now is the time for us to change the way we work. We want to help our guests to let go of being sucked into social media and to make more time for real-life connection. That's why we've decided to pause all our social media posts for a while. We want to focus our attention on welcoming people into our salons and looking after people in a way that responds to what they really need and want right now.

I'm going to keep having conversations to find out more about how other people relate to social media and how it makes them feel. I'd love to know what you've experienced and how important it is to you that businesses have a social media presence. If you'd like to be part of the discussion and help us shape The Chapels next chapter in this space just drop me a line to my email amanda@thechapel.co.uk.

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