Sunday Firesides: Benjamin Franklin Was Fine, and You’ll Be Too

Most of us use social media to entertain ourselves.

Fear of missing out is what drives us to scroll.

We feel that we are just a swipe away from ideas that can help us advance our careers, inspire creativity, or even live forever. If we leave our feeds behind, we risk being left behind.

To counteract that (often unconscious) fear, think about someone like Benjamin Franklin who, even though he lived long before social media, was able to invent and create civic organizations and write books that are still quoted today. He also helped found a nation.

When we consider Franklin's social-media-free-yet-still-fully-flourishing life, certain assurances arise that we may lay hold of:

Over thousands of years humans have created avenues - conversations, books, and podcasts - that allow you to be exposed to enough ideas to optimize your creativity and thinking, without sabotaging your attention span.

You can trust that, if there is a problem, you'll feel the need to find a solution. This will allow you to go straight to it rather than wading for hours through TikToks hoping to get a random answer.

If a scientific breakthrough was made to improve human health beyond eating well, exercising and getting enough sleep, you would hear about it in the news. You wouldn't need to watch 100 reels.

If social media were essential for living a happy and healthy life, the number of people who use it and how much time they spend using it would indicate that society's happiness, health and innovation would leapfrog ahead. But this is not the case.

You can trust that Benjamin Franklin was just fine without Facebook, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram. So were Plato, da Vinci and Tolstoy. And your dad from 1990.

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