Social Networking and Spiritual Happiness
By Lisa K.
More people use Facebook in one day than the entire population of the United States. There are now over one billion Facebook accounts worldwide, and of those, 552 million are daily active users creating 694,980 status updates per minute. Justin Bieber has over 50 million likes on his public page and over 700,000 Facebook fans ‘talking’ about him there. George Takei, who was Sulu on the old Star Trek TV series, has over 3 million Facebook likes and over 2 million of those followers are ‘talking’ about his page. Twitter is the second most used social media network with over 500 million accounts. A study done by the Pew Research Center states that over 69% of American adults use social networking sites.
These numbers are continuing to grow. It seems like everyone has a Facebook or Twitter account.
Why is Facebook and Tweeting so popular? It’s in our genes and it makes us happy.
What makes humans a successful species isn’t our opposable thumb, it’s the fact that we are social creatures. If Darwin had his say, the human species has been successful in winning the population race because of our opposable thumbs and being able to make tools. In Sociobiological terms, if we just had our hands and our tools, each of us alone could not build the gargantuan cities, technology and global infrastructure we have today by ourselves. We need each other. Sociobiology sees us as successful because we are social creatures.
When we talk, plan, communicate, and work together, we can then take over the world; and in fact, we have. Each of us as a single animal, so to speak, pitted against another animal our size, or even smaller, such as a dog, are quite weak by comparison. We need clothes to survive the cold, we have no fangs, no claws and we all think twice about eating meat that is raw. Yet, humans literally move mountains. All because we talk and boy do we love to talk to each other.
Dan Gilbert, a Harvard researcher in Psychology, who wrote about happiness in a best selling book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” states that from his research, “We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.” Not only are we genetically and biologically programmed for social interaction we receive great happiness from it.
Now we can Tweet and update our Facebook statuses to the point it becomes addictive. “Oh, I have to get off Facebook”, “I have to stop Tweeting,” “It’s such a big time waster.” But we can’t. Some of us Tweet and check our Facebook before we’ve even had our first cup of coffee in the morning, or even as we are driving to work. Watch out on that one, there are laws against texting and driving. With a few strokes of the keyboard, we are talking to hundreds if not thousands of people instantly. What could be better than that?
Is face to face better? You might think that technology is isolating us and keeping us apart, but studies show that it’s actually the opposite. A study done by Pew Internet & American Life Project found that people who use technology have social advantages. The technology helps people stay in touch and share more information that allows them to stay socially active and connected to their social communities. They found that these people have larger and more diverse networks of people than those that don’t use technology. Plus they are more engaged in their social groups. That’s because it’s easy. Now with your smart phone, you can be in touch with your social group anywhere at any time. Maybe it’s better than being there, you can bring your friends with you virtually where ever you go. There’s some comfort in that. The comfort of being supported by and engaged with others.
Part of our over all happiness lies in our expansion spiritually and that leads to spiritual happiness. Our spiritual happiness is based in our service to others, our sharing our experiences and helping each other through our engagement with people. Social networking just allows us to reach more people more easily. Then we expand our ability to energetically touch others through our words and even pictures.
So is social networking a fad? Probably not, it’s just an evolution that started with writing letters where the Postal Service would deliver in the rain, snow, or dead of night. With technology social networking evolved to the telephone, then fax, email, cell phone and instant messaging person to person, and then to Tweeting and Facebook updating to thousands of our friends and followers in an instant.
Social networking makes communication bigger, faster, better, stronger. Pictures, instant videos, chatting and texting all make it easier to share our lives with those we care about. Or it helps us find new friends to share with. It brings us closer together. It’s the next best thing to telepathy. We no longer need to wait to get home and write about our adventures, we can now share them in real time, instantly. Just sharing ourselves so easily seems to bring us virtually together, as if we are in the same place.
With that, we can touch each other in a more human way, a way that brings us closer to loving one another, even if it’s just to say, “I like you.”
Click HERE to Connect with your Daily Horoscope!
About the Author
Lisa K. is highly sought after intuitive counselor and teacher of every day spirituality. As a spiritual teacher and author of several blogs and online teaching media, Lisa shows people how to expand their awareness of spirit, and connect to the divinity within them. Lisa K. has helped thousands of people around the world through personal intuitive coaching sessions, online and in person classes, workshops, angel readings and her popular radio show, “Between Heaven and Earth” which presents a variety of topics on Every Day Spirituality. Learn more about Lisa K., visit her official site at http://www.LMK88.com or connect with her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/lmk88fans.
